You’ve decided to make your own business, non-profit, hobby, or blog website? The first thing you should do is choose an appropriate domain address and a favorable hosting plan, preferably from a secure hosting provider. Usually, newbies in creating websites get confused when they find that there are several hosting types, and they have to quickly choose between shared, dedicated, or VPS packages.
Each of these main types of hosting plans is adequate for the particular necessities of the users, and they may cost differently. To choose the best possible shared hosting plan for their individual needs, potential users have to carefully evaluate their real needs. But in almost all cases, a cheap shared hosting plan is the best solution for a beginner website.
Types of Hosting Plans
By purchasing a web hosting plan or package, future website owners actually pay for server space where the data of their webpage will be stored. Hosting providers are the liable party for the overall performance, security, support, and upkeep of the physical server.
The first question you have to ask yourself before buying a hosting plan is what traffic you expect for your future website. Cheap shared hosting is designed specifically for sites that have low to medium traffic. And this is why it is suitable for almost all new websites.
The main rule we advise everyone to follow when choosing a hosting plan or package is to never pay for anything they don’t really need. And in case a necessity for better service appears at some point, you can always upgrade it. That’s why we strongly recommend that absolutely all novice users of new websites choose to start their venture with a shared hosting plan.
Here are the three main types of web hosting and the variants of the servers they are based on.
Shared
The cheapest one is appropriate for nearly all beginner websites and for existing websites with low to medium traffic. The single shared server is used by several websites. This option allows the service to be offered at a lower cost as the price of maintaining the server is shared among the owners of all sheltered websites.
Sharing the same space, these websites are dependent on each other. At a certain period of time, when any of the websites sheltered in the server gets more visitors at once, the ability of the other websites to be visited at this very moment might be negatively impaired. This is the only significant disadvantage of the cheap shared hosting plans. Other drawbacks, for instance, the lack of a unique IP address for your website, are quite less appreciable.
Dedicated
This hosting and server type is the most appropriate one for exceedingly large websites that need immensely huge server memory. Such websites usually are visited by really vast numbers of people all over the world. Their owners can’t afford to upload them to shared servers for three main reasons: they won’t have enough memory space there, they won’t be easily reachable, and their presence on the shared server could potentially block other sites from being visited too.
The main advantage of dedicated hosting plans and packages is that the website is self-hosted on the entire server. This way, the traffic of your site is in no way dependent on that of other websites, as it is with the shared servers.
The main disadvantages of a dedicated server are two: the very expensive price of these plans and packages, as well as the overall responsibility for the security of the server that applies to the user. With dedicated servers, hosting providers still help with security maintenance. But the main responsibility rests with you alone.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Virtual Private Server plans are kind of a hybrid between a shared and dedicated service, and it somewhat combines the main advantages of these two types of server hosting. In terms of price, it is located between shared and dedicated servers. That means that it is cheaper than dedicated but more expensive than shared.
VPS service is wonderful for websites that have a significant increase in traffic and need more server space. In other words, it works great for medium to high-traffic pages. VPS has all the good features of a self-contained dedicated server, but it shares a very large physical server with other VPS servers that are also independently used by other website owners. The boundaries between individual virtual servers are virtual, but in practice, they act as real. And support for physical server space is shared equally among users.
Shared Hosting Plan: Advantages and Disadvantages
As with other types of hosting plans and packages, users of shared hosting services provided by high-quality hosts benefit from hardware, software, and security maintenance, as well as 24/7 customer support, regular updates, and a proactive attitude by the host. That’s why it is very important to choose a serious hosting provider who respects you as a customer and is responsible as a host and maintainer of the service.
When choosing a decent provider, you can certainly count on the ability to take full advantage of all the privileges and assets that a shared hosting service could offer.
Advantages
- Cheap monthly expenses: The main serious advantage of a shared hosting plan is its really very low price because the maintenance cost of the physical server is shared between several or multiple other users. Thanks to this hosting service, literally anyone can have their own website at a reasonable value.
- Easy to use: Though the physical server is shared with other websites, you will still have full access to your personal and unique control panel that allows managing your website’s overall appearance, arrangement, and content.
- Managed web hosting packages: Not all, but most hosting providers, such as Hostens, offer managed shared hosting plans and packages. With managed shared hosting plan, your host will most probably take care not only of the hardware, software, security maintenance, and updates. But they would also give you additional and proactive technical upkeep in relation to network interruptions and malicious external attacks. With such a plan, the host could also be additionally committed to maintaining and taking care of the full technical part of your website, hosting service, and WordPress (or other CMS) upkeep, so that you don’t have to think about anything else but the creative content of your flashy site.
- Dynamic websites-friendly: Webpages that have different appearances for each user, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, etc., are called “dynamic”. If such a website doesn’t have huge traffic, it could run perfectly well on a shared server.
- Code and CMS-friendly: Websites based on shared hosting work perfectly well with all the popular code languages (such as PHP and Python) and content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, etc.
- Flexibility: All shared hosting plans and packages are flexible and upgradeable. Anytime you need any specific additional feature or upgrade to VPS or a dedicated plan, you just need to ask the hosting provider to switch your plan to another, and they can do it instantly.
- Several e-mail addresses: Shared web hosting allows you to get several email addresses matching the name of your domain address, usually up to 10. This is especially good if you use your site for business purposes. Thus, each of your employees could benefit from a company email. It always makes a good impression if you communicate with potential customers and partners by a company email but not a random one based on Gmail, MSN, or Yahoo. Once you order the specific email addresses, you can check them and send emails by desktop and mobile apps such as Outlook or Thunderbird.
Disadvantages
- Security concerns: Unless you are subscribed to a managed shared hosting service, you should pay additional attention to the security of your website. Concerning server security, no matter if your package is managed or unmanaged, it is the provider’s liability to protect your website from getting infected by other websites that are sharing the same server and that might be affected by any malicious activity. Some rogue providers often underestimate security, and this way, they might put your content at risk.
- Weaker overall performance: Bad website performance might be a serious issue with some shared hosting providers. As the features of shared web hosting servers aren’t proportioned in advance, and they’re in practice used by everyone, this may lead to sporadic and short-term drops and delays of the connection to your website. In such cases, your connection might be affected due to reasons beyond your or your provider’s control. Most often, the reason could be significantly higher traffic to any of the other websites over a limited period of time. But in general, unpleasant performance drops and delays occur pretty rarely with decent hosts that fairly carefully distribute the websites in certain servers.
- Crashes: Since shared hosting users’ websites are sheltered under a single roof, the performance of your website could get progressively weaker, and this could end with the overall collapse of the server. This could infrequently happen when a server is overloaded with other websites by unconscionable hosts. To avoid crashes, always rely on services from only reputable and responsible hosting providers that take proactive care of the performance of their customer’s websites.
Final Words
Evaluating well your personal necessities will definitely help you choose the best plan or package for your individual demands. As you are always free to jump up to a VPS or dedicated server anytime, we kindly advise you to start with the cheap shared hosting plan that will be pretty enough for your just-beginning website. And it will save you a lot from many unnecessary expenses.
Check Hostens’ cheap shared hosting offers today. We can assure you that our shared hosting servers are being managed and maintained with the most effective practices in the field of web hosting that minimize the possibility of potential performance and security issues.