If you think of launching your business online, you have to host your site on a server. Shared hosting is popular nowadays and suitable for starting and small businesses. Before investing money in a shared hosting plan, you should know the pros and cons of shared hosting.
Here you will get to know about shared hosting, how it works, key consideration facts, and finally pros and cons of shared hosting.
Let’s get into the topic.
What is Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting means sharing a server with multiple websites. Often website owners can’t identify who else is using the server. Also, how many resources a user will use are pre-defined, limited, and defined by the service providers in shared hosting.
Besides, shared hosting is a cheap web hosting service and an economical option for beginners or small businesses.
Read: Shared Hosting Vs Managed WordPress Hosting
How Does Shared Hosting Work?
Before knowing the advantages or disadvantages of shared hosting, you need to know how it actually works and what you will need to consider before buying.
Let’s see how it works.
Hosting is a must required for every website to make it available for users online. All your data is stored in a server, which is called hosting.
When you keep your data on the server, it becomes available for users. There are different hosting options available for users and shared hosting is one of those.
When users request information through a browser, the server provides users all the necessary data in a systematic way.
Moreover, shared hosting stores data of several sites in one server store and provides the data to users of their query.
As shared hosting takes fewer resources and the same resources shared by different users, that’s why the hosting plan is less expensive. A shared hosting plan is enough compatible for small businesses with small monetary investments.
What Are Key Considerations of Shared Hosting?
Before investing money in shared hosting, you need to know what you can expect from the providers.
- Budget and Features: You already know why shared hosting is cost-effective. As you are sharing resources from a server, the hosting plan should be within budget and affordable. So when choosing a service provider, consider what features they offer and whether it is the best one for you or not.
- Storage space: Depending on your website’s size, consider the disk space is enough for storing your databases, files, and media.
- Uptime: How long your websites or resources will be available to your visitors is called uptime. Even though hosting providers guarantee 99% uptime, so make sure your website’s uptime is up to 99%.
- Bandwidth: Bandwidth determines the data transfer rate of a network and the amount of data users can download or upload from a website. You have to pay if the bandwidth limit is exceeded. But most hosting provider companies allow unlimited bandwidth.
- Security: Consider ensuring the security of your data, as it is crucial for any website.
- Customers Support: Customer support is essential to ensure the availability of support from the expert if any technical issues occur.
- Database: As technology is frequently upgrading, you need to cope up with that. So consider choosing the server, which supports databases like MySQL and programming languages like PHP.
- Dashboard Interface: It’s hard for a beginner to understand everything about how a website works or how to control it. But an intuitive control panel may help you to a great if you don’t have any previous knowledge. cPanel is the most used and easy hosting control panel ever.
Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting: Details Information
Let’s see why you should use a shared hosting service that means the most advantages and disadvantages.
Pros of Shared Hosting
- A shared hosting service is the cheapest one to consider the hosting specifications and affordability.
- Most shared hosting providers offer a free domain while purchasing their hosting. Bluehost is one of them.
- Doesn’t require previous knowledge about Linux or Windows.
- Suitable for starting or small businesses.
- Supports MySQL and PHP.
- Easy cPanel interface makes the task simple to manage your website.
- Have an option for more than one database, and you can create multiple email accounts and sub-domains on your domain.
- Most hosting companies provide maintenance, 24/7 hrs technical chat support, which ensures uptime reliability.
- Setup is effortless as it has an easy website management system. It comes with an easy installation of WordPress (Softaculous), built-in DNS management, and email setup.
Cons of Shared Hosting
- Lack of admin access. When you need to perform admin tasks, you can’t do it.
- You only know that you are using a shared server, but how many websites share resources to the same server you won’t know. If your service provider is jam-packed and they have the intention to generate more revenue, then you may face a lack of performance.
- If file permission is misconfigured, it causes easy access to hackers or cybercriminals.
- A shared server lacks the security of data and websites. (Shared hosting is a big fact for WordPress site security.)
- Sometimes, the server may become overloaded, which causes slow loading or downtime of the website.
- Fewer features to explore compared to dedicated server hosting or WordPress hosting.
- The probability of experiencing limitations of using server resources.
- Support will not be the same as dedicated server hosting plans.
Should You Choose Shared Hosting?
As we already mentioned, shared hosting has many advantages, but at the same time, it has many drawbacks.
Suppose you are not struggling with the budget. In that case, we recommend choosing a dedicated hosting plan or managed WordPress hosting that ensures security, support, and excellent performance.
If you are a micro-business owner, things are a little bit tight and make up your mind to start your online business, then go for shared hosting. But ensure to choose a reliable hosting provider.
My Recommended Top Rated Shared Hosting Providers
- Bluehost (Best for starting and small business and resources)
- Hostinger ( Best for starting)
- inMotion (Good enough for a small and medium business website)
- NameCheap (Best for starting with the lowest price)
Read: 6 Best WooCommerce Hosting Providers (Compared)
Last Advice of Shared Hosting
Now that you are informed about the pros and cons of shared hosting, it will be easy for you to decide whether you should invest your money in shared hosting or not. But if you like a shared hosting service, keep in mind the above key considerations.
