Probably one of the most popular choices for new and established webmasters who are looking to purchase a web hosting package is to go for shared hosting and basically what that means is to have your own individual account with the company you choose and with the features that they offer and that you will be sharing web server space with other customers.

This does not mean that your files and folders are mixed in with others and making a mess and confusion but it does mean that you are sharing the server resources, so the processing power will at times come under some strain.

This is a very popular choice, to go with the shared web hosting option, because for a lot of websites, especially websites just starting out, they may not need that much at first, for many people when they launch a new site, it can take a while for their site to gather traffic and  often customers just start out with a rather basic website at first and build upon that over time.

So shared hosting can be ample for quite a large majority of new web projects, but its worth taking into account what i mentioned about sharing the resources of the server and if you know from the beginning that you may want to use a script that may be known for putting a lot of pressure on a server then naturally you would want to look into this a bit more to see if a shared hosting account would be enough.

A good approach would be to contact any web host that you are interested in and discuss anything that you may feel would cause problems further down the line once your website becomes popular.

Also on some shared web hosting the company may not allow a certain type of script or they may not have a particular feature enabled and if you need one of those features that may be missing from what they are offering in a package or if they dont allow a particular script to be running on their server you will want to find this out before signing up with them.

Although one of the most common ways to pay for web hosting is on a monthly basis, its also quite common for them to offer the package on a 6 month term or 12 months where you pay in advance and dont have to worry about payment for that duration, so once again you want to know all of the important facts and everything that is neccessary for you before you commit yourself to a longer term contract with the web host.

The reason some of the web hosting companies offer a package on a 6 or 12 months term is so that they can offer you discount for your loyalty so its a bonus for you if you are happy with the company and their services and they get to hold onto you as a customer for longer which is exactly what most of them want.

Well for now this is just some of the basics to think about and to take into consideration when you are looking at what each web hosting company offers in their shared hosting packages, in other posts i will go into more detail and point out some of the other important factors to keep in mind.

By doing some research on a company before committing to anything with them it can save you a lot of future problems and is definately worth the time invested.

Filed under: Shared Web Hosting by admin Published May 25, 2008