By Bob Martindale
Shared web hosting is often the best option to choose when you’re ready to put your website online. However, the number and variety of web hosting options can be overwhelming. Let’s try to cut through some of the confusion and see why shared hosting is usually your best choice.

Shared hosting, sometimes referred to as “virtual hosting”, is where most people start out. In this arrangement, the same server or computer is shared by many different web sites. All of the sites have their own individual slice of data storage capability, and they are securely separated from other sites on the same drive.

Shared hosting will provide sufficient disk space and resources for most individual, hobby, or small business sites that don’t have a lot of traffic or tons of multimedia running on their site. A certain amount of system resources are allocated for all the sites on the server, and they share these resources.

While this won’t happen with most shared hosting setups, it is possible for one or two sites to experience large traffic or bandwidth usage spikes, which can pull down the performance of other sites on that server.

As an example, let’s assume someone has a site selling a product, and they put a video on the home page that automatically starts playing when someone visits the page. Then, they buy advertising on highly active traffic exchanges, which results in other people hitting their page very frequently. Each time someone hits the page, it starts loading the video. This is unusual activity that can drag the performance of that server down and affect other sites on the same server. Good hosting companies have people online 24 hours a day watching for things like this, and making adjustments accordingly.

Shared web hosting prices have come down dramatically in the last few years. For less than $12 a month, you can host several personal sites and have plenty of disk storage and bandwidth allocation. Be careful to sign up for monthly service at first, to see how well the host performs for you. Later, you can take advantage of excellent incentives to sign on for longer periods.

If you are also are interested in creating your own website from scratch, be careful with the hosting deals where you are offered site creation tools. Some of these are very easy to use and quite appealing, but a few are proprietary tools and should you choose to leave someday, moving your site to another host could be difficult. There are lots of excellent site creation tools out there that aren’t tied into hosting plans – if you want to use this type of tool, this is your best bet.

Bottom line – shared web hosting is the best choice for most people, and offers enough flexibility and options for almost all applications. Just be sure to check out your host carefully before you sign up. The competition for web hosting is very fierce, and there are lots of garage or basement servers trying to make a buck this way. – 23596
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Looking for the best hosting solution for your website? Get the scoop about the inexpensive solution that works well for almost all webmasters – shared web hosting.