Shared Hosting After you design and develop your site, the next step is to buy a hosting service. There are thousands of web hosting companies and choosing the best service for your site is quite difficult because there are more types of web hosting: dedicated hosting, shared hosting, managed hosting, etc. If you own a small site and the price is them most important factor, then you should buy shared hosting. But before choosing a hosting provider you should understand the concept of shared hosting, the advantages and disadvantages that it involves. 1. Shared hosting is the most economical way of hosting many sites on same server, if the sites don’t require too much bandwidth and disk space. The number of sites can go up to hundreds or even thousands of sites, if the server is equipped with latest hardware technology. Because all the sites use the same computer, the price can go down to $3 per month. Due to this reason, the majority of webmasters ask for shared hosting. 2. Are you ready to have access forbidden to server settings? There are also some disadvantages when using a shared hosting service. The server administrators have to take supplementary security measures. So the server administrator will limit access to server settings in order to prevent a server crash. When there are thousands hosting accounts on same computer, there are higher chances that someone will try to hack other’s sites. 3. You have to pay a lot to gain access to server settings. If lots of users have access to server settings there might be a webmaster that uses more resources than others. There are software solutions for equally dividing resources to all users, but if there thousands of users, they become useless. Also a single site can produce an error that will make the server stop. Then the server administrator has to reboot the machine and all sites will be affected. 4. Usually, the “mail” function is disabled to all shared hosting servers. This is happening because many webmasters try to promote their sites by making spam. This will not affect only the server stability but also will end with a ban from main e-mail servers. 5. Read the web hosting forums. When you are planning to buy a shared hosting service, it is a good idea to check the charts with the servers’ performances and choose one with a small down-time percentage. Also there are lots of web-hosting forums where you can find discussions about each server. You might find interesting things that will help you to choose the most suitable server for your site. 6. A small paid banner on your sites will produce twice the money you paid for hosting. Nowadays, the shared hosting offers also lots of advantages. The bandwidth can go up to 30GB per month for only $4. This is much more than a small site needs. The prices are going down and some companies come with possibility to host more sites on same account. This means that you can have up to 5 sites with own domain each, for only 3 - 4 dollars per month. 7. Run away from free web hosting. Even if the prices are very small, there still is a high demand for free web hosting. But everyone knows that most of these servers are very crowded and the performances are at the lowest level. | 
