Web hosting options explained: Part 1

When you first create your website one of the big decisions you make is where

will you host it, and how. It’s an important choice impacting the performance of

your website for as long as you keep that hosting (you can change later but it’s a

lot of work).

So what are the options and what are the major differences in the types of

hosting? There are three types of hosting:

Shared Dedicated Content Delivery Network

The two most commonly used for the bulk of websites are shared and dedicated. Whichever one you use, your website will reside on a server at the hosting company’s facility. In this first of three posts on web hosting options we’ll cover shared hosting. Shared hosting

In shared hosting, you share the server with many other websites – hence

the name. Using a technique called virtualisation, hosting companies are able

to run many different websites and applications on a single server. The benefit

of this is it makes hosting extremely affordable. Hardware, software, security and

maintenance cost a lot of money. If you share a server, then those costs are

divided up among everyone one who uses it. For just a few pounds a month,

you can get your website online and have most of the software available to

maintain it provided by the hosting company.

Beyond the low cost though, there isn’t any advantage to shared hosting. And there are several pitfalls. There’s a queue for one. Since multiple websites are sharing the same computer

resources, each has to take its turn in line to access them. For example, say you

share a server with an ecommerce store running an amazing sale that just went

viral over social media. Thousands of people are now visiting that website and

making purchases. Meanwhile you have visitors trying to access your site. What

do you think happens? Well, your visitor requests get in line with the

thousands trying to access the online store before the sale expires. Your

website will load more slowly (and so will the store’s website), and your

visitors may grow impatient and leave.

Such frenzy might be too much for the server, and it might crash. Everyone’s

website on that server will go down. Or maybe it isn’t a shopping spree, but an

innocent programmer working on his client’s site uploads and tries to run a

program that has a glitch. Then suddenly the server speed slows to a crawl

because it is spending all its resources running the faulty program. And though

most hosting companies have protections against this sort of thing, the bad

program could actually take the server offline.

Those are just two examples of how other people’s websites or activity on the shared host could affect your own website. Another issue could be that your

website is doing so well that you exceed the fair use policies in place for shared

servers. Many companies list this sort of restriction in the fine print, but it means

they have the right to shut your website down if it is causing problems for other

users (the aforementioned examples would also be subject to this rule). You may

be doing nothing wrong – just finally getting the traffic and attention you want

when the company decides you’re too big for shared hosting and takes your website offline.

Even without issues your site is guaranteed to go down regardless. Shared

hosting usually guarantees some level of uptime – less than 100%. For

example a 99.9% uptime corresponds to about 8.76 hours down per year. You

have no control over when this downtime may occur. If your site goes down for

longer than the agreed downtime, you may receive credit to your account, but

you can’t get back the visitors that couldn’t see your website.

If you’re not willing to take these risks, there is another alternative: dedicated

hosting, something that is especially useful when considering streaming or

hosting video content.