Due to its cost and reliability, shared web hosting is now the ideal choice for small and medium-sized businesses. With its special features and applications, it is definitely the online solution for many business owners who for long have believed that having a reliable online presence is very expensive.
Shared hosting gives you the opportunity to share a server with others thereby making it affordable for you to own and maintain a website. A hosting provider utilizes IP and name-based virtual hosting that allow one server to have multiple host names that all point back to one IP address. This way your site is placed in an environment where the cost of keeping it online is shared.
However, the affordability of being on a shared platform should not give rise to poor services. Many providers make use of powerful servers and up to-date operating systems in order to provide quality service for their clients. A quality service must, therefore, have the following features.
1. Unlimited disk space: It is important to choose a host that can offer you an unlimited disk space. You wouldn’t want to be restricted to certain gigabytes because as your business grows, your web files grow. But be careful of providers offering unlimited disk spaces that are not really unlimited
2. Unlimited bandwidth: I hope I’m not boring you with the word ‘unlimited’. But that is the most common word in shared hosting environment now. A lot of providers now offer unlimited bandwidth which means that there is no limit to the number of people who can access your web pages at a specified period. Make sure you verify this
3. Unlimited sub-domains: By now, I think you should be used to the reigning word, ‘unlimited’. A quality shared hosting service must come with an unlimited sub-domain offer. You should be able to create as many sub-domains as possible on a single hosting account. This will help the growth of your business because you can create different sub-domain for different aspect of your business.
4. Unlimited email account: Your establishment requires more than one email address for smooth operation. Nothing stops you from creating an email address for each department in your company. Some members of staff can also have customized email addresses created for them. This will boost the reputation of your company and enhance professionalism.
5. Control panel: For easy site management, a control panel is very vital in a shared web hosting package. Designing of web pages, creation of email accounts, database creation, editing of web pages, addition of various web applications, etc, are some of the tasks that a control panel is used for.
Tags: shared hosting environment, business owners
“I switched from Webfaction to Rackspace cloud awhile back: I got tired of fighting the shared hosting environment. Now I have automatic deployment running exactly the stack I want (modern Ubuntu, Varnish, Apache, memcached, psql 9, etc.) with standard configs, paths & binary names, no random server grinding to a halt due to a backup job chewing disk I/O, etc. Plus it was cheaper. EC2 is going to be almost identical: both will give you a standard environment very quickly and let you focus on the app. I would recommend following the emerging deployment consensus (fabric + or buildout) unless you have truly unusual needs as it’s a well followed path. Azure runs on Windows so you’re going to need to spend a lot more time playing sysadmin since they still don’t have sane package management and automation tools are much weaker. I’d only go down that path if you either have a Windows requirement or are dramatically more familiar with the platform.”