What Is Shared Hosting? A Guide

By Wendy Peterson  |   Submitted On April 07, 2016

  

There are many types of web hosting available. One of the main types of hosting is shared hosting, and this also happens to be one of the cheapest.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is the most inexpensive type of hosting one can get. It is this cheap because multiple such accounts share the space on the same server, each of them having a certain partition allocated at the account opening.

It can be the best solution for a small business or an individual to have an online presence without needing to spend a lot of money. Shared hosting can be as cheap as a couple of dollars per month, and even cheaper shared hosting can be exceedingly good for most uses. This means that basically everyone can be online, regardless the amount of money they can afford to spend for that matter.

Now that you know what is shared hosting and how good it is for beginners, you have to know about the downsides as well. The main disadvantage of shared hosting is that all websites on a server share its resources. Whenever one of the websites gets hacked or has a traffic spike, it may happen that it consumes all available resources, thus causing the server to shut down (there are exceptions eg SiteGround). This means your website will stop working or slow down, as well as all other sites that are hosted together on that sever. This may last only a few minutes, but in case of serious troubles, it may last for hours or even for days.

This is why price should never be the only important thing when choosing a website hosting provider. A very low price might hide an ugly fact: the provider, in his attempt of increasing profits despite of the very low price, puts too many websites on the same server. As a result, the server becomes unstable and it may need frequent reboots, thus causing your site to go offline each time it happens.

There is a way to find reliable shared hosting: reviews of other users. This is why you should search the web for such reviews before signing up with any hosting provider. Discussion forums are very useful, as many webmasters would post there if they are unhappy with such or such hosting company. You can read that information and if you need details, you can join those forums and ask for it. People are usually happy to help, so you'll probably manage to find out pretty quickly if a certain hosting company is unreliable or has low quality services.

Now that you know what is shared hosting and how it works, all you have to do is find a reliable provider. You don't have to shy away only because your files will be on the same server with hundreds of other websites. If the server is good, if the site loads fast and there's online support that answers your inquiries within minutes, there's no reason to go for more expensive solutions if you can't quite afford them for the moment. Go with shared hosting and once your traffic grows, you can always migrate to VPS or dedicated servers.

BlueHost Best shared web hosting provider, read Bluehost Review here.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Wendy_Peterson/2200877

Why Should You Go With Windows Web Hosting?

By Shweta Singh  |   Submitted On February 23, 2016

  

There are quite a few advantages of going with Windows web hosting when it comes to choosing a web hosting provider today. In this article, we are going to have a look at a few of the advantages of this web hosting and why you should consider it for your website:

.Net Framework

If you have a website which runs on a .Net Framework or on visual basic, Windows is the best choice as your hosting provider. In fact, it is the only choice which is going to give you exactly what you need for being able to build a great website using these languages. You will not be able to use any of these languages if you are on UNIX hosting. Windows is your only choice here.

Front Page extension

If you are using the web design program called Microsoft Front page then you can make your life a whole lot easier by running on a Windows hosting platform. This way, you will not need to worry about checking if your server supports the required extensions like you would need to if you were running on a UNIX platform.

Easy to use

If you like how the Windows OS works, you will love how Windows web hosting works too. It will certainly be much easier for you to understand as compared to UNIX hosting. You will not need to worry about learning a different language just so that you can manage your website. This is a great benefit for any beginners.

.ASP & Dynamic database

If you are thinking of using Active Server Pages or if you require dynamic database driven pages on your website then Windows is the best choice in these regards. In fact, UNIX hosting will not even support .ASP, which will make this choice a whole lot clearer and easier for you to make if you are using this popular language for scripting. In fact, the popularity associated with .ASP has forced many website owners to switch over to Windows hosting even though they have been using UNIX for a while.

Access compatibility

If your site has to collect any of its data from a database in Access, Windows servers are great since they can seamlessly integrate all of this information for you without any trouble. While there are quite a few database options out there like MySQL, there are a lot of people who still prefer using Access. With a Windows server, integration will become a whole lot easier for you here.

Development

If you are a developer who uses a software like Visual Interdev or are looking at developing certain Windows based applications for your website then it is recommended that you go with a Windows web hosting account. This is because UNIX will not support any of the Windows development programs out there and if this is your preferred development language, you will be best suited to get a Windows based server.

With so many advantages, there really is no reason why you wouldn't consider using this platform now is there?

Shweta Singh has been closely associated with a number of websites that run on Windows servers. They have years of experience with this service and are in the best position to tell you all about it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Shweta_Singh/2249804