Shared web hosting means that a single physical machine and all the resources available on it are pooled between hundreds of users. Every user on the shared hosting platform is allocated a limited amount of services such as disk space, bandwidth, FTP accounts, databases, and email accounts, among numerous other services.

Before you decide whether or not to use a shared web hosting option for your website, it is essential to understand what you stand to gain and what shortcomings to expect. This will enable you to decide if shared web hosting is the correct hosting option for you to use on your website or blog. Shared hosting has a range of advantages that businesses and individuals can benefit from by embracing it.

The Advantages of Shared Hosting

Cost Effectiveness

The fact that shared web hosting is usually offered at extremely an affordable rate is perhaps its biggest advantage. With as little as $5-$10, you can tremendously benefit from shared hosting services. What is more, one can manage to acquire sufficient space more so because of the stiff competition due to the many web hosting firms in the market. Nowadays, getting up to 40GB of storage is not impossible in shared hosting.

Customisation

Even though resources in shared hosting are shared among several users, the website is still managed by the webmaster using control panel tools. The control panel is user-friendly and a powerful tool that can help you customise your website. The control panels help users to manage a range of features such as uploading files and images, as well as checking site statistics. This means that shared hosting also allows you some amount of customisation.

Convenience

We all want convenience when running our daily errands and this includes website management. With shared hosting, your web hosting will be managed by highly professional and well-skilled experts and, therefore, grant you adequate convenience. This means that you can concentrate on running your web business.

Efficiency

Among the most crucial aspects as far as web hosting is concerned are the disk space and bandwidth given by the servers. It is the bandwidth that helps business owners run their businesses efficiently. As stated earlier, you can get adequate bandwidth with shared hosting, which you can use to add more resources to your site.

These are some of the advantages that surround shared web hosting. Even though it has some disadvantages as you will see below, your choice is all dependent on your business requirements.

The Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

Crashes

This is actually a cold hard truth that must be let out in the open, unfortunately. Even though you can easily get a respectable web hosting provider, the dependability of shared web hosting has always been questionable. In spite of all the proactive measures put in place, the act of putting thousands of websites on one server exposes the machine to failure.

Performance

The performance of your website can also be an issue in shared hosting. Let us utilize a simple example, something that actually happens all the time. Suppose you are experiencing moderate traffic on your website and another user on the server experiences a sudden increase in traffic.

That user’s sudden change in traffic can have a direct impact on the performance of your website making it take forever to load pages. This can be extremely frustrating to your visitors who may opt to seek information elsewhere.

Security

With cybercrime rising on a daily basis, it is necessary to ensure that your website is secured. Unfortunately, security is another critical aspect in shared hosting. Perhaps this problem has been accelerated by the freedom webmasters receive from hosting companies.

It only takes one of the webmasters in the shared hosting environment to misuse HT Access or any other sensitive element to cause all kinds of chaos on the server. This could give intruders access to your data, especially if you are not proficient in programming languages. What is more, if worst comes to worst, your website could be blocked if issues of malpractice are recognised on the server.

Fortunately, these disadvantages can be solved by using a reliable web hosting company such as Gecko that has the right technology and knowledge to handle the stated issues.

Speak to one of our advisors today and get started with a private VPS server or shared web hosting account today.