What is Shared Hosting?

From the largest of businesses and organizations to small players in the scene, all are scrambling to make an online presence. They are fighting to drive in more consumers day in and day out. With all the bombardments customers get every single day, it becomes challenging to stand out from the crowd. One of the most effective ways of standing out, however, is through having your unique website and services. Having an online site nowadays gives organization credibility and builds rapport and trust early on with the customers. Plus, people get to know about your business from anywhere in the world.

With websites, comes the need for a web hosting company. One of the best ways organizations and small businesses go about creating this online presence in by using ‘shared hosting’ services. If you opt to go for shared hosting, it means that your website will share a server with many other sites. However, you will still have the ability to have your domain address; after all the goal is creating your unique presence online.

Shared hosting services are perfect for small businesses who do not have such heavy bandwidth requirements and traffic for their sites. But this is not to insinuate that shared hosting services are inferior. It solely depends on the current situation and your use. Plus, sometimes it’s the most economical option for startups.

Why should you go for a shared hosting service?

In a nutshell, shared hosting is the most cost-effective plan out there considering it is less expensive than other hosting services such as dedicated hosting. Because of its popular demand, it is offered by almost all of the top hosting companies such as SiteGround, A2 Hosting,, and FastComet. As a business owner or a single individual, you need to judge the requirement of your company. IT needs and allocate resources strategically while also keeping in mind your budget and financial constraints.

For instance, shared hosting services to become viable when the organization is a beginner or simply operating on a small scale and do not need huge bandwidths with lots of server disk space. It is an outstanding balance between cost and features. If your site will feature a lot of static brochures, or low graphically strong components or if it is just a personal site, a shared hosting plan fits the bill perfectly.

The good and the bad

As it is with everything, there are some good and bad aspects of shared hosting plans too. Here is a breakdown of the pros and cons of shared hosting to help you make a better decision.

The Good

• Cost effective: Shared hosting plans are the most budget-friendly option. As you are sharing the server costs with other sites, you have to pay less compared to dedicated hosting. Think of it as carpooling but for websites.
• Setup taken care of: With a shared hosting plan, your setup will be all taken care of by the hosting companies themselves. Therefore, leaving you with enough time to work on just building your professional website.

The Bad

• Others on your shared server may slow it down : Unfortunately, the most significant advantages of shared hosting can end up being its Achilles’ heel. A server at the end of the day is a computer with components like processor, ram and hard disk space. In the same way that a computer gets slowed down if you run too many programs, a server with lots of shared domains can slow down your site’s performance.
• Other shared server users may end up hogging your bandwidth: By the very definition of shared hosting, there will be more domains and sites sharing the bandwidth of the server. This can sometimes lead to one place hogging up all the bandwidth, maybe due to poorly written code or a sudden increase in traffic. It’s a phenomenon called ‘the bad neighbor effect.’ Although all hosting companies try to avoid this, it is still nonetheless a risk you take when opting for a shared hosting plan.

Which Shared Hosting service should you go for?

You have decided you want to go with a Shared Hosting plan, now what? Next step is to find the right hosting company for you. Almost every significant player in the hosting industry offers shared hosting services, but there are a couple of things you need to be aware of:

• Reputation: Try to find out about the reputation of the hosting company you have your eyes on. Dig around the internet, are there any adverse or negative reviews about the sites? If there are what are they and vice-a-versa. If the customers are praising the hosting company or some of their specific features, would those specifications add value to your business?
• Bandwidth: Probably one of the most, if not the most important criteria, to look for while you are going about choosing a hosting company is bandwidth. Generally, everyone picked a package with high disk space and bandwidth. If you will be running a site that will feature heavy graphics and with many pages where you know you will be getting quite a lot of traffic, then you might want to look into higher bandwidth options. On the flip side of the coin, if you are going to run a primary website with not that much going on, maybe a less graphical site with less web traffic, a lesser bandwidth package should be sufficient.

Most website hosting service providers to offer an unlimited plan and you also have the option to upgrade your plan in the future. You can gradually scale the site as more and more people start to visit your page increasing your traffic.

• Security: This is also a big one. Forbes contributor James Lynn mentions more than 3000 websites are hacked a day. That might be a scary statistic but teaming up with the right hosting service keep you safe and sound. Keep in mind there are no perfect solutions since hackers are getting creative with loopholes every day, but a reliable and reputed firm will perform regular backups to ensure a secure and remote server. This way in the face of a disaster, your data will still be retrievable.
• Uptime: The internet never sleeps. Even if it is 2 am in your local country, it may be peak business hours somewhere else. People will be visiting your website from all around the world who can even turn into potential long-term customers if you have a business website. Your site,, therefore,, needs to be up and running 24/7. Top hosting companies do guarantee an uptime, but you should look into it properly yourself before taking the plunge.
• Load Times: People’s lives are busier now than ever. Couple that with the lowest attention span generation in history makes your business a whole lot difficult and competitive. Your site needs to be fast and fluid with minimal load times. Statistically, people are known to close web pages that take too long to load, and you’ll end up losing potential customers. For many, your website is the first impression they’ll have of you, so you better make it count.>
• Customer service: Last but not least you must choose one which has excellent customer service and technical support. In case you counter a problem, you need to be able to call customer services and get it sorted out as soon as possible.
• Know your needs: Finally, before making any commitments, you need to assess your own needs. What do you want out of the hosting service? What are your specific needs and which company fulfills them and gives you the best deal? Find the perfect middle ground between features and the prices.

The Extras

Besides these services, there a couple of extra features a hosting service company can provide. One of them is business solutions for an E-commerce platform. If you are operating a site that sells products, you can choose a hosting service that has e-commerce solutions within the packages or as an add-on. You will thank yourself for it later. Instead of having to deal with the technicalities of the e-commerce aspect yourself, you are better off getting your hosting providers to do it for you. This leaves you more time to focus on growing your business, making up strategies for more customer acquisition.

Conclusion

Choosing a web hosting company and then a comparing their shared hosting packages might seem like a daunting task, no doubt. But every bit of it is worth it. Creating an online presence is necessary in today’s world. Taking your time to look around for the right hosting company that matches your exact needs will pay off in the long run. Use our advanced tools to select any hosting service providers to compare them, or just put in your desired specifications for the best suitable match for you.