A Closer Look At The Pros And Cons Of Shared Hosting

If you are considering starting a website, one of the things that you will have to arrange for is hosting. There are different types of hosting that are available, but here we will focus on shared hosting.

Shared Hosting Overview

Shared hosting is the most accessible type of web hosting available. It’s affordable and it’s easy to use. However, after a website grows to a certain size, shared hosting will no longer be feasible.

These days, there are great deals out there on shared hosting but it may or may not be a suitable option for you. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of this type of hosting.

Pro: Shared Hosting Is Affordable

These days it isn’t unusual to see shared hosting plans being offered for less than $5/month. Shared hosting packages are being offered at low costs and with perks such as the provision of email addresses, and automatic content management system (CMS) installations. 

Pro: Easy to Manage

You don’t have to be a technical person to be able to manage shared hosting. Usually, all of the activities that need to be carried out can be done with a control panel that has a graphical user interface (GUI) like the popular cPanel.

With a few clicks, you can carry out your hosting activities and you won’t have to worry about typing any Linux commands. 

Pro: Easily Customizable

Since shared hosting plans typically use a control panel like cPanel, they are easy to customize. Doing things like adding additional email addresses and managing files is easier with a control panel with a GUI. 

Con: Limited Resources Available

As the website that you are hosting with shared hosting grows, it will become increasingly difficult for your plan to handle the stress placed on the resources you are provided with.

With shared hosting, multiple accounts are hosted on a single server. This means that your website will have to compete for resources with all of the other websites being hosted on one server. For smaller websites, this won’t be an issue.

However, bigger sites may crash if too much demand is placed on the server. Furthermore, hosting providers may even take your service offline if they detect that you are using too many resources or engaging in abusive activity. 

Con: Increased Security Risk

With shared hosting, since many sites are hosted on the same server, users of this type of service face increased security risks.

If one of the accounts being hosted on the server that you are sharing experiences a cyberattack or gets infected with a virus, you might be affected too.

Because providers can fit many accounts on one server, they are able to offer the service at a low cost. However, the fact remains that if a security breach occurs on one server, all of the accounts on that machine may be affected. 

Wrapping Up

Shared hosting packages let several users access the resources of one physical server. Due to this clever arrangement, hosting providers are able to charge low costs for web hosting.

In addition, shared hosting is usually easy to use and easily customizable since providers give users great tools to manage their hosting accounts. However, users will have limited resources and might be at a greater security risk.

If you choose to buy a shared hosting package, ensure that your provider has firewalls in place to hedge against security risks.

Also, if you are planning on hosting a website that will use up a lot of resources, then you may want to consider a more powerful solution. If you are running a smaller site, then shared hosting is completely fine.