Shared Hosting
It’s time to get serious. You want a web site that looks good and stays online, with your own domain name. You want a shopping cart, and a real e-mail service you can rely on. You want to be able to store files, and be reasonable sure they’re going to be there tomorrow. The good news is that such services are quite affordable; a domain name may cost you $20, with a shared hosting service costing perhaps $80/year. This gives you shared access to a server owned by the hosting company, which is populated by many other users.
Shared Server Review
However, there are problems with this scenario. A shared server is suitable for a basic web site, but not much else. Because you are sharing your server with many other users, you’ll often find the server is overloaded by other people’s activities. Your web site might be slow because other users are hogging resources, and you might lose an occasional e-mail due to other users on your server distributing spam. You’ll be restricted in the types of applications you’ll be able to install and run, because the hosting company manages the server and all of it’s resources. Your sensitive data is at risk of interception, because after all, it’s running inside the same machine as perhaps 1,000 other businesses like yours – shared server infrastructures are notoriously insecure. Despite the abundance of hosting companies who advertise “unlimited hosting” at low prices, the fact remains that you are sharing a computer – computers always have finite resource limits, including storage, CPU power, network bandwidth and I/O performance. If you have a problem, you’re not likely to get a lot of technical support for $10/month. If there’s a component failure such as a dead hard disc, or hackers break into the server and erase all of it’s data, there’s not much the hosting company will do for you. Worse, these small hosting companies generally have a life-span of 3-5 years. When their business fails, you’ll have to rebuild everything somewhere else.
Examples of shared hosting infrastructures Plesk or cPanel
The majority of small businesses function at this stage of IT development. It’s the digital equivalent of leasing a small room in an office building, with everyone sharing the same telephone number, photocopier and coffee machine. It’s better than trying to do business on a street corner, but you certainly don’t stand out from the competition in any way. Examples of shared hosting infrastructures sold by hosting providers are Plesk or cPanel.
You can also keep up to date with current trends and technology by visiting Data Center Talk where we keep you informed on important changes as they occur.