Shared hosting is the best option for the beginners to get uninterrupted quality hosting service at affordable cost. There are a good number of hosting services offering quality shared hosting accounts.

There are various types of hosting plans, shared web hosting, dedicated hosting and managed hosting. When affordability is your prime concern then the first one is the best choice. If you want your website to launch on a big scale you can go for dedicated or managed service.

Here we are going to see in details about the shared web hosting service. In the beginning shared hosting is enough to meet the requirements of small business owners. As said above you can get quality service at affordable cost. Go in details on the advantages and disadvantages of choosing a shared web hosting service and decide weighing your business web site requirements.

Why it is called a shared hosting service?

If high performance and high bandwidth service is not required at the moment, shared hosting is the best economical choice. As the name implicated the web server hosting your website will be shared by a number of other websites. It may be thousands in some cases. Because one web server is shared by thousands of websites the hosting company is able to offer their shared service at affordable cost.

You need not worry about the quality of the shared web hosting service if you buy it from a reputed hosting company. It won't compromise on the performance issues and 24 x 7 service backup. The web servers are monitored, operated and maintained by well qualified and trained IT professionals round the clock.

Server downtime is the prime concern of the website owners to have their web presence without interruption. A quality company would ensure a minimum server downtime. Usually shared hosting servers are run on Unix or other multi user operating system. You will get a shared IP addresses with separate account. The web resources are fixed one for all the websites hosted on these shared servers. Below are the details of shared hosting advantages and disadvantages

Advantages

As previously said, you get cost advantage as the maintenance of the server is shared by thousands of websites.
The hosting fee will be affordable at $4 to $10 dollars per month according to the features you get.
Competition has lead to great offerings to the consumers with technical features that can easily met the requirements of small business owners.
The offerings are, web space with as high as 1000 MB and band width as high as 40 GB.
Shared web servers are maintained by highly skilled professionals. You can peacefully concentrate on your business website as the maintenance and uptimes of the shared servers are vested with the knowledgeable persons.
With shared web hosting you will be given a control panel or similar tools to manage your website. You are free to upload files, remove web pages and check your website statistics.
You can create your domain specific email accounts.
Some server companies offer the facility to add more resources at reduced cost in case you overrun the allotted web space or bandwidth.

Disadvantages of shared web hosting service

Compared to dedicated server the server response time will be slow for the shared web server.
Though the hosting company will take care for the high performance of the shared server, sometimes the web server will be down due to a malicious program or over utilization of resources by another website sharing the server. Downtime means inaccessibility of your website.
There is the possibility of a ban of the shared IP address by the ISP provider or search engines due to the acts of one bad website in the shared hosting server. In dedicated server there is no such possibility.
Though the hosting company takes care of the security issues there is a possibility of hacking your account by other webmasters, sharing the server, to get sensitive data.

Now you know the shared web hosting service advantages and disadvantages. Weigh the plus and minus, your business concern and your website requirements before finally deciding on the shared hosting service.

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