What to Consider When Choosing Shared Hosting

When choosing a web hosting company, you’re going to have many different options and choices but the main decision you’ll have will be to choose a shared server or a dedicated server. A dedicated server is exactly what the name implies.  They’re dedicated to being your only server. When you choose a shared server, you’ll be sharing the server with many other sites.  You may be sharing it with only ten sites or you may be sharing it with hundreds of other sites.

Web hosting companies that offer shared servers often offer you a discount because you are sharing with other sites. Some of these multiple sites may even be your own. While you’ll enjoy the huge savings over paying a dedicated server, there are some things to consider before making your decision.

Availability is the first thing you need to consider. When you’re sharing servers, you’re much more likely to be booted off when the network is busy with traffic. Have you ever gone on a site at night and found that it’s much slower than during the daytime? This is because there are shared servers and much more traffic. You wouldn’t find this problem with a dedicated server. Unix-based systems experience this much less than Windows, but it still can happen with shared servers.

Capacity is another major consideration when deciding if you want shared servers. A person can only carry so heavy of a load. The same goes for your server. If there is a heavy load of traffic, things are going to slow down immensely. The CPU (central processing unit) of the computer can only handle so much. While large servers have many CPUS, they can still only handle so much at one time.

Ask the server what they capabilities and ask for specific numbers. All systems have the capabilities to report how much traffic they’re getting as well as how much they can easily handle. Once you get these reports, compare them and compare the numbers. This is probably one of the most cost-effective things you can do when trying to choose servers. If you’re not able to interpret what all the numbers mean, it will be to your benefit to find someone that can do it for you.