The Hosting News Blog

Whether you are just getting started with your online presence or you a
veteran with many years online, shared hosting is probably one of the
cheapest and most effective ways of hosting your own site. The vast
majority of sites are all hosted on shared servers and there is a reason
that these plans are so popular. First and foremost, they are cheap, and
second, they usually have a decent set of features that make them
worthwhile to most site owners. However, is shared, cheapest
hosting the smartest solution for your site? Let’s take a look at some
of the pros and cons of shared web hosting.

Pros

Low cost – Most shared web hosting plans cost less than $15 per month.
If you are just running a personal site or a blog, you really don’t
want to spend much money since you won’t be generating any income on your
site.

Feature Sets – Today, the majority of shared hosting companies offer
enough features that these plans are well worth the money. From
Fantastico to unlimited email and databases,  php web hosting support etc, you can usually find a shared hosting plan that offers
everything you need.

Decent Limits – For those with basic traffic needs, the bandwidth and
disk space on a shared hosting plan are more than sufficient.

Cons

Server Issues – This is mainly a problem when you are working with a
web hosting company that has too many people on one server. Each and
every site is sharing the resources on a server and sooner or later,
something has to give. Whether one site has a traffic spike or a DDOS attack
hits, everyone else on that server is going to suffer for it.

Security Problems – Although most shared servers are quite secure,
there are a few that have had some major issues. This is usually due to
sites that are using banned applications or if one site on the server is
hit with a malicious attack. As mentioned above, DDOS attacks are also
quite common and will affect the whole server, not just the targeted
site.

Not Enough Room to Grow – If you have an ecommerce site or your site
becomes very popular, a shared web hosting plan will usually not be
powerful enough to meet your needs. You’re going to need higher levels of
disk space and transfer as well as more processing power.

Conclusion

In the end, the answer of whether shared hosting is right for you can
only come from individual site owners. Every site is different and will
have different needs. For most, shared hosting is more than sufficient,
but for those with larger sites, a bigger solution such as a VPS or
Reseller hosting package is usually better suited.

When you are looking for web hosting the qualities you probably look
for in perspective host is price, the amount of bandwidth and space
included and reviews of the host on the web etc. There is another Item you
should also consider, that is how the web hosting company is backing up
your website.

Making sure your website is backed up sufficiently is one of the most
important items you should consider when choosing a host for your
website. Losing a bit of data from your website can hurt your company, losing
it all could be fatal. Problems do arise, everything from accidently
deleting data from a database all the way up to your web host’s hard
drive failing.

Web hosting companies have various tried and tested methods of backing
up their clients websites with the most popular probably being the
backup system that is included in the Cpanel web
hosting software.

Although perfectly capable, the Cpanel’s backup facility is not without
its flaws, such as load inflicted on the server during backup runs and
the lack of facilities for clients on shared servers to restore their
own backups.

An alternative backup solution that has become the “buzz” word of late
is CDP (Continuous Data protection), this basically means that when
data is written to the hard disk, it is also backed up to another
location.

There are a couple of advantages of a CDP backup system like this such
as the obvious one that your website data (files, database, emails etc
) is constantly being backed up and there is a revision history of your
backups should you need to restore one from a specific month, day or
even hour!

There are plenty of companies out there now offering CDP backup
solutions such as Symantec/Veritas and EMC and there are plenty of web hosts
that offer this kind of backup protection for their clients, Dream
Hosting is one of these web hosting companies.

So remember when you’re looking for a new host ask them about their
backup systems and make sure your website is being protected.