Shared Web Hosting : The Cheapest Hosting option to start your Blog

We already wrote about relatively higher priced options to host your website or WordPress Blog, namely Dedicated Server and Virtual Private Server (VPS). But, the cost starts at a higher price, so these might not be nifty options for beginners or if any one wants to create a portfolio website.

Shared Web Hosting offers to host your website or blog for just few Dollars per month.

How Shared Web Hosting works

Shared Web hosting is one of the most commonly offered service by the web hosting companies . Depending on available resources, it allows a variable number of domains and web sites on one physical machine.

You might wonder why other form of Web Hosting options are so costly when compared with Shared Web Hosting service. Basically, to run a Data-center; huge continuous expenditures are involved. One Physical Machine might not cost very high, neither the Bandwidth. But with the target for 100% uptime, these data-centers needs huge air conditioners, power backups, employees etc. these factors actually increases the cost of Web Hosting.

This problem of higher cost is reduced by Shared Web Hosting plans : one physical machine can host 500 or more small websites, there by the cost is reduced to approximately 3 $/ month. These are the benefits of Shared Web Hosting and it is where the benefits ends. Because, this structure makes the Shared Web Hosting unstable than a dedicated server or VPS.

Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting

While the advantages of Shared Web Hosting are practically two : reduced cost and allows to use own server, the disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting are numerous.

As in Shared Web Hosting, all the websites hosted is sharing the same resources : processor, memory, disk space, it becomes unstable. Shared Web Hosting theoretically can give above 99% uptime, but practically it get reduced to ~97% or less. That might be pathetic for a Blog.

Some experts says Bad Neighborhood can affect a good websites performance on search results.

Conclusion on using Shared Web Hosting

Shared Web Hosting is the cheapest option to start a website. Despite the negative points, it can not be denied Shared Web Hosting offers the independence of having own website on own server. As the Advertising revenues will increase gradually, one can easily switch from Shared Web Hosting to Virtual Dedicated Hosting or even Dedicated Hosting sooner or later.