Affordable Web Hosting

- About Shared Hosting

Welcome to Affordable Shared Hosting. Our goal is to provide facts, profiles, and unfiltered consumer feedback (including complaints) of every major provider in the Shared Hosting industry so that you can make better choices. Whether you need a simple plan for one website, or a provider that allows multi-domain hosting on a shared server, we will provide you with the details you need to know.

What is Affordable Shared Hosting?

Shared Hosting is an affordable way of hosting your web sites. If you do not need the full power a dedicated server provides and your requirements for disk space and bandwidth usage are not high, an affordable web hosting solution is the right choice.

Your site is hosted on a server with many different sites allowing you to SAVE! Many users are hosting on this server helping to offset the cost of the entire server. How affordable is shared hosting? Shared Hosting can range anywhere from as little as $4 to $10 depending on the options you select, such as Bandwidth, Disk Storage and Number of Email accounts.

Affordable Shared Web Hosting Services

So you may be wondering then, what are the advantages of choosing an Affordable Shared Hosting option? The biggest advantage is Price! No offer of a Virtual Dedicated Server or Dedicated Server can match the inexpensive price of choosing Shared Hosting. Even Virtual Dedicated Servers can cost $30 / month and more and those have to be managed by yourself. Shared Hosting takes care of everything for you. All security patches and support of the server is done without you needing any background knowledge. You purchase a shared hosting package, the Company will set everything up for you and then you upload your files and your done. Your website is now Live and hosted.

Shared Hosting provides you a control panel to manage all aspects of hosting you require. Through the different control panels you can manage tasks such as adding domains, creating databases, scheduling cron jobs and setting up email addresses for your entire company. The ease of use of an affordable web hosting provider makes it right for many individuals looking to host their web site.

How to Select the Right Web Hosting Service

The right hosting service for your web site really depends on what your goals are for the site. Various services are being offered to fit your requirements. A few options you will be interested in as a web site owner:

Is your site straightforward brochure or more complex?

If you are developing your own web site, then you will know the requirements with regards to programming language, database needs and media you want to use. In most cases, a web developer or development team will be creating your site. In this case, you should ask them how graphic intensive the site is, and the average size of the page when it is loaded to a visitor. This includes graphics to load, as well as complex queries to the database. The more graphics you have, the more bandwith you will require. The more complex the database queries, you will need to ensure the database will be operating efficiently and not bogged down by other users.

In some cases, people are looking to put up a site just for fun and are looking for free hosting. Their are many ad supported free hosting options out there, but you will have to be content with the ads taking up your screen real estate. This is the most affordable, but not a good option for actual businesses or professional web sites. For a personal blog or free website, you can consider Blogger by Google, or another one that can create more visually appealing web sites is Weebly. Please note, with these you can set up a domain to point to their hosting, but with the free quick option you will get an address like mysite.blogspot.com or mywebsite.weebly.com

Back to the most common option - a paid hosting solution. For starters with a small brochure type web site (think local small businesses like a plumber, dentist, lawyer), you will likely not getting large amounts of traffic - just many targetted visitors. With this requirement, you can easily go with an introductory shared hosting plan, which typically can net you specs like: 5 GB of Space and up, 500 GB to Unlimited Bandwidth, 100+ email accounts and even as many as 10 MySQL Databases. If you are running a more intensive site - such as a web forum, interactive blog with many comments and visitors, or a social bookmarking type of site - you will need to explore the higher end of shared hosting packages, possibly even dedicated servers.

If you simply need a free personal site supported by ad hosting, or looking for an affordable web hosting solution that will cost you a monthly fee - just remember that every hosting provider has unique packages and you will need to read reviews and compare before making a decision. If you decide on one provider, and their service is lacking, you can always switch to another hosting provider to find which one stands up to your standards.