Shared Hosting is the most popular and highly used type of hosting for websites, especially WordPress users.
The one question that arises among many beginners, what type of hosting should I buy for my website. I can say that shared hosting is the best for beginner bloggers, who wish to start a website.
But why should you go with shared hosting for your websites?
If you have the same question in your mind, read this article to learn about shared hosting.
As beginner bloggers, we find it difficult in choosing the hosting plan for our websites, its because we want to be much careful in choosing the best hosting for our websites.
Basically, all hosting comes with different hosting plans like WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting. Ok, let’s get started with shared hosting.
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is a kind of hosting, where multiple websites are stored on the same server. In the shared hosting, you will get a separate space for your website to store.
However, you are allowed to have your own resources according to space and features allocated for you. Based on their Hosting package, every user will get their server resources.
Many hosting companies offer a high range of features, storage, and security, but it is necessary to choose the trusted hosting.
Why Shared hosting is best for beginner websites
Simple cost is the first thing, why beginners should go with shared hosting.
You can buy the shared hosting plans for a cheap price from the hosting providers. There are many hosting providers like A2 hosting, Bluehost gives you unlimited features at an affordable cost.
On every hosting company, shared hosting will be the starting plan and a much economical price when compared to VPS and dedicated hosting.
Shared hosting mostly comes with the cPanel, so you don’t need to put extra effort to manage your technical aspects and it makes you easily access the features.
The hosting companies will design their shared hosting plan, mainly for beginners, so you don’t need to be more technical to start using it.
The hosting companies like Bluehost come with automatically installed WordPress. So, it makes your CMS installation process easier.
That’s why I say that this type of hosting is more suitable for new businesses and bloggers.
Advantages of using Shared Hosting
- Cost-effective Plans – Shared hosting is much affordable when compared to VPS and Dedicated hosting. You can get hosting anywhere from $1 to $100. The cost of the hosting is less because many people are sharing it. You can get premium hosting from $3/month.
- More Flexible Options – The shared hosting plans are easily flexible. You can buy the plan for your exact needs, if you need extra resources, then with a few extra dollars you can easily scalable. You can easily upgrade your storage, bandwidth, Ram, extra websites, FTP users, and many more.
- Easy setup – The shared hosting is highly-designed for less techy people. So, the hosting companies will make your installation process and tech features easier to handle. So with minimum technical knowledge, within 5 to 10 minutes, you will get started with your website. The WordPress optimized hosting companies will allow you to get started your wordpress site in a couple of minutes. Bluehost is a WordPress recommended hosting provider and it comes with automatically wordpress installed. So, you don’t need to learn about installing WordPress, it makes your work easier.
- Less maintenance – The shared server plans come with easy maintenance. Most of the time the hosting companies will maintain the things, so you can focus on your business. The shared also comes with automatic updates.
- Secured – Even though the server is hosted with multiple websites, you can get higher security for your websites. Mostly every website is highly isolated and has separate resources. Premium hosting companies are giving more security features to prevent malware attacks.
Disadvantages of Shared Hosting
- Performance – The speed of the shared website is relatively lower than dedicated hosting. Its because it is accompanied by many websites. (But the companies like A2 hosting, providing turbo servers on a shared plan, it will make your website quite faster than others)
- Memory and Usage limit – You can see that many hosting plans indicate that unlimited storage and bandwidth. But the fact is, nothing is unlimited. You will only get what you pay for. Every company that says unlimited, will have some other restrictions to make you stop at a certain point from using their resources.
- The slowdown happens – The shared hosting is designed to handle only limited traffic and resources. If you have any sudden traffic spikes, then the website slowdown will happen. Sometimes it also has a higher downtime. Some low-cost companies will store more websites on a single server, which causes higher downtime (To reduce downtime, buy only the reputed hosting).
Shared Hosting Alternatives
There is no straight alternative to shared hosting plans, but you can upgrade your websites to a better plan.
When upgrading, you can go for three types of hosting, that are cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated server.
Cloud hosting will highly improve your website’s performance and speed. Cloudways is one of the famous cloud hosting providers in the market. You can get cloud hosting for $10/month, which gives you top-notch performance for your websites. Get Cloudways free trial.
VPS hosting is costlier than shared hosting and is followed by dedicated hosting, which is top in flexibility and performance.
If you are upgrading from shared to VPS or Dedicated hosting, choose the best hosting companies to get their real performance. There are some companies, which give you dedicated hosting at the cost of shared hosting, but it lacks better performance.
If you are upgrading, only go for better companies, that give you top-notch performance.
How to choose the right shared hosting Plan
Lookout these features and key considerations to buy shared hosting for your websites.
Storage space and bandwidth
Storage space and Bandwith is the first thing to look out when choosing your hosting plan. On average the hosting companies give at least 10 GB of storage on their basic plan. It is more than enough for new sites. But having higher storage space is better.
Bandwidth capacity decides how much users can visit your website every month. Some websites mention the allowed bandwidth limit or others mention average monthly visits. So choose the bandwidth based on your needs.
You can also read their conditions, what happens when your allocated resources exceed.
Customer support
The most important thing you have to check whether they provide faster customer support. In case if we face any issues, they need to support us at the right time.
Check what type of customer support is offered by hosting like live chat, phone, email, or only ticketed support.
Security Features
We know, that security is important for every website, because it will prevent our site from various attacks like malware, viruses, and hackers. So lookout for the best security features. Some hosting companies also provide free malware cleaning when your website is infected.
Better Performance
Look at their performance features and how it helps to improve your website speed.
And also check, is there any money-back guarantee or free trial option available with them. Some hosting provides a free trial, so you can try the hosting before paying anything.
List of some best Shared hosting companies
- Bluehost Hosting – It is a WordPress recommended hosting. Best for beginner bloggers that comes with 50 GB SSD storage for the basic plan.
- GreenGeek – Comes with the best features at an economical price. It is completely green hosting.
- A2 Hosting – Shared hosting plan comes with turbo servers, which highly increases your website’s speed and performance than other hosting.
- Cloudways – It is the top cloud hosting provider. From $10/month you will get powerful cloud hosting.
- WPX Hosting – It is quite costly shared hosting when compared to others. But it offers managed wordpress hosting, that gives top-notch performance and technical support. WPX also gives you free malware cleaning from their experts and free site speed optimization. It is completely value for money.
- Siteground – For more than a decade, it is one of the best hosting for beginners. But its renewal cost is high, but it has good customer support.
Over thousands of hosting available in the industry, so go with the best suits you. Make sure your choose hosting is more reliable.
Frequently asked questions
Shared hosting is a method of storing multiple websites on one large server. It allocates separate storage space and resources for every website. For example: Consider an apartment that has multiple houses, and similarly, your shared plan works.
Yes, off-course the cloud hosting is faster, because cloud hosting has multiple servers.
Mostly the shared hosting plans easily handle 10,000 visitors per month. Some premium hosting allows you to easily handle over 50,000 visitors per month. But for more than 50,000 visitors per month shared hosting is not recommended. Because it will highly affect your website’s performance.
when compared to the other hosting your page loading time will increase. Sometimes, when your site receives more amount of traffic, your server speed gradually decreases. If your host stores more websites in your server, then it also leads to higher downtime.
Shared Server Wrap Up
The shared hosting has many extensive features for your websites. If you are just starting out in the online world, then shared hosting can be your better companion.
A penny saves is a penny earned
If you are a technical guy, then there are many companies, that offer you a set of developer tools to get more flexibility. Don’t invest more money in hosting as a beginner, because there are many premium hosting companies that are available at an affordable cost.
Initially, buy shared hosting as a beginner and if you think that it is not suitable for you, then with a few extra dollars you can easily upgrade yours.
I hope this helps you to learn about shared hosting and why it is best for new websites. If you have any other questions, just comment me below.
