Shared hosting plans are usually much cheaper than regular ones. Most often, people habitually associate cheap with low quality, which is absolutely wrong when we talk about services in competitive environments, such as software and hosting. This is precisely the reason why people often wrongly underestimate shared hosting plans and pay for more expensive regular plans instead that comprise features they do not really need.
In this article, we will help you understand the difference between regular and shared hosting plans. And also, we will help you choose the best shared hosting variant to satisfy your individual necessities for a very decent price.
What a Shared Hosting Plan is?
Shared hosting plans are services that offer shared physical servers to host your website and server maintenance. That means that with shared hosting your website will be sheltered on a single physical device together with several other websites, with which you will be sharing the same resources. By partitioning common resources, the website owners could take advantage of all the economic advantages of a shared plan and enjoy a great hosting service for a very low price.
Shared hosting is the most affordable and easily upgradable hosting service, which is perfect for any new website. And when your site starts to have much greater needs for more traffic, then you could immediately switch to a regular hosting service without being incurred with any monetary penalties.
What a Shared Hosting Plan is Good for?
A shared hosting plan is a great way to meet all your needs on any website with low to medium traffic. This is the reason why it is perfect for any just-starting website initiative. At a low price, you could get absolutely everything you need for the online presence of your business, hobby, or non-profit initiative, including any of the following kinds of websites:
- Absolutely any type of business website (as long as it is a legal business)
- Pages of public and cultural institutions (such as medical centers, cinemas, schools, kindergartens, etc.)
- Online stores (with up to medium traffic)
- Blogs (personal, photography, travel, poetry or other)
- Websites of a non-governmental organizations
- A thematic forum (for example, a forum for car sports enthusiasts)
Advantages of Shared Hosting
As the best shared hosting providers could offer many beneficial advantages, we could easily assume that any business entrepreneur or mover of another type of initiative could be happy with a shared plan at an affordable price. Here is a list of the main advantages of this type of hosting service:
- Cheapest price: Shared hosting plans are the cheapest hosting option as all the users of a shared server benefit from the same common server resources.
- Best plan for beginners: If you are a beginner in creating a website, shared hosting is the best option for you as it provides you with everything basic you need without making you pay for services you will unlikely use.
- Easy to manage: Almost all of the good hosting plans come with a free control panel, which makes the usage of the hosting service easier.
- Upgradable: Anytime you notice that your website needs more recourses, you could instantly switch to any regular plan. With this opportunity, you could pay higher only when you really need the higher resources.
- Maximum operation time: With shared hosting, the time during which the physical server is in operation is usually higher as any of the several websites could be reached at any time.
- Free maintenance: Maintaining the physical server is the responsibility of the host. As maintenance is included in the shared hosting package, there is not any server upkeep required by you.
Disadvantages of Shared Hosting
Though it has many pros that make it perfect for nearly every just-starting initiative that might need a website, shared hosting also has some disadvantages. Here they are:
- Occasional speed issues: There might be some periodical speed problems in reaching your website as any other website, which is using the same shared server as you, might be visited from really a lot of visitors at the same time. But the good news is that this is happening from time to time only.
- Server security concerns: With shared hosting, you never know which websites are neighboring your site. This means that your website might be vulnerable to server attacks by malicious hackers targeting other neighbors’ websites. But it must not be a thread for you as long as you use a daily backup add-on.
- Limited features: Since the main purpose of the existence of shared hosting services is to make the option of owning a website possible for everyone, the shared plans usually have some limited or missing features that are available with the regular plans. However, in case you need a particular extra, you can always include it as an addition to your main shared plan.
Which are the Custom Hosting Types?
Since you already know all the pros and cons of shared hosting services, it means you can decide whether a shared or regular plan would be the best option for you. But in order to let you make a better comparison and a confident choice, here is a brief overview of the main types of custom hosting plans and their main benefits.
- Dedicated hosting: This is the type of hosting plan when the physical server is dedicated to a single website only, and it is the most expensive one. This is an option that is useful for huge websites with very high international traffic and a lot of resources needed, such as torrent trackers, movie streamers, video libraries, etc. Very typical for this type of hosting is that the responsibility for maintaining the physical server is shared between the provider and the customer.
- VPS hosting: VPS is the short abbreviation for “virtual private server”. In general, it is a relatively cheap service that is quite close to the shared hosting service as the websites are sharing a common physical server space. But the difference from the shared service is in the fact that the resources here are individual and none could breach the virtual boundaries of your website. This property makes VPS servers the best choice for websites with moderate memory needed and huge international traffic expected.
- Cloud-based hosting: With this type of hosting, your website could be sheltered on various servers at the same time, and it could use higher resources anytime it needs them. In case the resources of your new site may vary, it might be the best possible opportunity for your business, non-profit, or another type of initiative.
How to Choose the Best Shared Hosting?
Depending on what a person is looking for, they can choose their best shared hosting choice among the variety of hosting providers based on the following principles:
- Best possible price: The ability to save money on unnecessary services is the main advantage of shared hosting plans. So, there is no real point in paying for expensive shared hosting services.
- The largest number of extras: The more extras (such as domain-related emails and daily backups of your site) the hosting service offers, the more attractive it will be to you and the clients.
- Richest resources offered: The larger the resources of the shared server, the better the performance of your site will be.
- Decent customer support: The presence of 24/7 feedback option is very important so any server problem can be fixed as soon as possible. With 24/7 customer support, you could save unpleasant emotions, possible damage to your public image, and material losses.
Take a Look at Hostens’ Shared Plans
Founded in 2003 by the Lithuanian hosting company of “Interneto vizija”, Hostens has been around for 2 decades and has proven its high-quality services and decent shared plans. Based in Vilnius, Hostens has excellent experts that ensure their customers with 24/7 proactive care, maintenance, and around-the-clock customer support.
Hostens is among the internationally famous hosting providers that offer one of the best shared options nowadays. Each of the shared plans by Hostens provides the following wonderful features:
- Free control panel (cPanel or CloudLinux)
- Free “Let’s Encrypt” SSL certificate
- Free website builder
- 24/7/365 proactive server monitoring
- Free daily backups
- Excellent memory and resources (shared plans are being offered with 10-50GB disk space and 1-4TB bandwidth)
- Prompt setup (setting your hosting service takes up to 10 minutes after the confirmation of the payment)
- 30 days money back guarantee
- Hundreds of free email accounts
Considering all the useful features Hostens’ shared plans offer, it is no wonder that Hostens was rated 4.7 out of 5 stars on the prestigious Trustpilot websites for rankings by real users.
Final Words
You already know what shared web hosting is, how to evaluate your needs (i.e., if you need a shared or a regular hosting plan), and how to choose a decent host offering a shared server service.
Here is a piece of advice we would like to recommend you follow. Keep two main things in mind when choosing a hosting plan: never pay for things you do not really need, and never give up what you really need.