One of the easiest ways of hosting a website is to opt for shared web hosting. Web hosting providers that offer this option take it upon themselves to do most of the “donkey work” by allowing their clients to focus on the day to day tasks of running their websites rather than having to worry about unrelated matters like the system administration of web servers.

Who is it for?

This method of hosting websites is the most popular because it meets the requirements of most websites. That means, unless there is an extensive amount of software development involved in a site’s creation (thus requiring more control of the server) the majority of websites we see on the internet are capable of being hosted and run on shared hosting. To be more specific, shared hosting is ideal for personal websites, those that are owned by small- to medium-sized business and any other sites that have hosting requirements that are similar to the parameters that are required by the aforementioned types of sites.

Price

Apart from the ease of use, shared hosting also offers the optimal price range of all hosting solutions. A good example is Arvixe Web Hosting which offers almost all the features a webmaster would ever require at a mere $4 per month. This is made possible due to the fact that all the costs of running a web server are shared among the number of users that are hosted on it.

How it works

Included in most shared hosting plans are the likes of basic web statistics (that show traffic numbers and geographical location of people accessing it), email and webmail services. For example, BlueHost Web Hosting offers unlimited email accounts with their most popular shared plan.

Clients that sign up for shared hosting services are given web-based control panels that make it easy for them to configure and manage their sites with the simple click of a few buttons. On the other hand, the hosting providers are responsible for everything else that runs in the background. For webmasters that want to move to them from another hosting provider, they provide a service that ensures a smooth transition. InMotion Hosting actually guarantees that no downtime will occur during the transfer to their servers.

Shared hosting providers are also responsible for the smooth running of their servers and commit to making sure that their servers are up and running 99% to 100% (or as close as possible to it) of the time. They make sure that their clients’ websites don’t fall victim to hackers or malicious software attacks by protecting the servers using the latest anti-virus, operating system/application patches and other software technologies available. They also scan through the source codes of the websites hosted on their servers to look for hidden hacking scripts that could be, intentionally or otherwise, hidden among them.

This all means that webmasters can rest assured that the shared hosting provider they have their sites will put in as much effort as possible into making sure that there are no glitches in their service because in case of failure it might prove disastrous for many of their clients. And nothing can do more damage to a company’s reputation (especially a hosting provider) than the angry reviews of disappointed clients.

In case of issues with the hosting, clients can turn to the hosting providers for technical support. One good thing about working with hosting providers that have been around for some time and have many clients is that they face challenges from as many sides and over time develop a knowledgebase of information that becomes a helpful reference for their current clients. When faced with a problem the clients can simply go through the knowledgebase and find a solution for them on their own.

If that doesn’t work, the clients can log into the forums and talk about the issues with other clients as there will be many of them (provided that the hosting sites has a large client-base) and someone in there will have faced the same exact problem and thus be able to lend a helping hand.

If all else fails, there is always the option of contacting the hosting providers’ tech support. One good thing about the support that they give is that their clients are spread all over the world – in all 24 time zones if they are really good at what they do. This means that they can’t afford to be caught snoozing and will need to have a tech representative (or rather a bunch of time) on call 24 hours a day, every single day of the year. They make sure that they can be contacted every possible way: email, “contact us” forms, by raising tickets, via live chat and even toll-free telephone numbers e.g. Arvixe Web Hosting and InMotion Hosting provide toll-free number for clients that are manned around the clock.

When people think of “shared” resources they automatically worry that someone (or some website) might share a little more than the others – especially if they have applications on them that are resource intensive. But to begin with, no respectable shared hosting provider will run its servers until there are no resources left and it leads to a slowdown of performance let alone crashing of websites. The administrators monitor the resources and make sure that no site is taking more than its allocated shares. Secondly, hosting providers like BlueHost have resource protection technology in place, which identify websites that use more than their fair share of resources and temporarily re-assign them to isolated systems. This allows for the protection of the performances of the other clients’ websites and mitigates the risk that is normally associated with shared servers.

When choosing the best shared hosting company for their sites webmasters must makes sure that all, or as many, as possible features mentioned above are included in the web host’s services. As mentioned, BlueHost, Arvixe and InMotion are our top choices for shared hosting providers and would be a great place to begin searching on your quest.