With most of the major companies placing their shared web hosting plans front and center of all their marketing efforts, such plans have effectively become the default option for many of us when it comes to setting up our new websites.
There’s a good reason for this, too.
Sure, whilst the larger, more expensive options such as dedicated servers and VPS hosting certainly have their own benefits to offer, there’s a good few advantages of shared web hosting beyond merely avoiding the time and effort incurred by shopping around for an alternative.
So, why exactly are shared hosting plans the most popular products offered by the web’s leading hosting companies? Let’s find out.
Low cost
Let’s be honest, the biggest benefit to taking out a shared hosting plan is that they’re by far the cheapest option on the market.
With so much competition out there, most providers really go to town in promoting special discount offers and ongoing promotions that continually reduce the cost of hosting to just a few dollars or pounds per month.
How can they offer such cheap deals?
By the very nature of shared hosting, these companies can squeeze more money out of a single server than they could if they sold one as a dedicated solution to a single company.
By dividing up their servers into individual partitions, they can sell lots of sections of a single server to lots of different customers, meaning its cost-effective for them, and a Godsend for those of looking for hosting on a budget.
Be careful though, that after the first term (usually one year), that great discount you signed up for is no longer valid, and you’ll be looking at paying the full amount.
Even still, shared hosting at its most expensive usually costs less than other plans at their cheapest.
Ample storage space and bandwidth
For some of the web’s biggest websites, or at least those with a large of amount of space-hogging files such as video content, a different kind of hosting may work out to be more suitable, though truth be told, this applies to very few of us.
Most shared plans come with enough disk space, bandwidth and other essentials to power small to medium websites, the kind which actually make up the majority of the web.
In some instances, you’ll even find that you’re provided with ‘unlimited’ resources to power your site. Whilst unlimited in this sense isn’t to be taken literally -there’s usually an ‘acceptable use’ policy in place- it’s still more than most of us need to run our business site, portfolio or your average eCommerce store.
Ease of use
As the web continues to evolve, more and more efforts are being made to make building and running a website accessible to anyone, not just those with expert web design skills.
This includes shared hosting, which makes launching our websites simple by providing us with a clear, easy-to-navigate user interface and a whole wealth of tools that give us the power to do more with our websites without having to learn anything technical.
Since all of this is done online, there’s no software to download and install, tying you to one computer every time you want to update your website.
This means that wherever you have an Internet connection and a laptop, PC or even a tablet, you can log into your website’s control panel and make the changes you need to make.
All the maintenance is taken care of for you
Web servers can be tricky little beasts to set up and maintain on a regular basis.
With a shared hosting plan, this isn’t something you have to worry about. Your provider handles all this for you, so the only thing you have to worry about is making your site as good as it can possibly be.
What’s your favourite aspect of shared web hosting? Let us know on Twitter @WebDesignDIY or join in the conversation on Facebook today.
