Shared Hosting: Best Solution for Small Websites and Blogs

Shared hosting plans are one of the first you will come across even if you don’t search for them. Most hosting providers advertise their shared hosting plans first, because they are the cheapest, thus the most attractive. Every shared hosting plan is below $10 and even below $5 most of the time. They provide the perfect solution for those who are just starting a website or for developers who want to test their code. Shared hosting is the option most people use when they want to build a portfolio website, a blog, a personal website, a simple company website and other lightweight sites that don’t get huge amounts of traffic at once.

The reason why shared hosting is so cheap is simple. You aren’t renting an entire server, nor are you using too much of the company’s resources. You just rent yourself some space within a single server or a network of servers. It’s like renting a room inside a house where you share the bathroom and kitchen with the others living there. Basically, shared hosting is like a cheap dorm room that doesn’t offer too much but it is good enough to live in. Of course, how good it is depends on which company’s space you rent. You want to be really careful which house you move into. If move into a house with a half functional kitchen and you also have annoying neighbors, than the experience is pretty much ruined. But if you move into a nice house with a pleasant old lady keeping things clean and in order, you’re bound to have a more pleasant experience.

The quality of service differs from company to company, which is why it’s important to do your research and choose wisely. Here, we’re going to outline the things you need to know to find out whether shared hosting is for you.

Pros and Cons Of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting isn’t the best type of hosting out there, that’s for sure. Although it is the cheapest and it can serve you really well if the company’s management is good, but it comes with some obvious downsides. The same way moving in with other people you don’t know comes downsides as well.

The Pros

It’s Very Affordable – Since multiple users share the same server with different accounts, it doesn’t cost much for a company to maintain the service. Which is why they can give you a hosting plan for the price of a sandwich. But since numerous websites share the same resources, there are some obvious downsides to it as well.

It’s Easy To Mange – You don’t have to have any technical skills to use shared hosting and upload a website. After watching a few tutorials and understanding how the user friendly cPanel functions, you’re good to go. The hosting company will take care of any other technical need that may arise.

Has Numerous Customization Options – Even though shared hosting is pretty limited, it can be easily customized to your individual needs. You can ensure that your website runs smoothly and that you have all the custom features and apps that you require to run on your server.

The Cons

You SHARE the Resources – The reason why it’s called shared hosting, is because you share your resources with everyone else on the same server. This means that in many cases, if another website starts to use more, it will affect your website’s performance. A big traffic spike to one site might mean instability to the rest of sites on the servers. It is also more common for shared hosting servers to fail than for virtual or dedicated servers.

Security Vulnerabilities – The level of security you have depends mostly on how well the company manages the server. But because you share space with plenty of other websites, there are plenty of ways hackers or malicious scripts can penetrate the server. If one of the sites on your server gets hacked, there’s a good chance the hacker can get access to your data as well. There are numerous security measures you can take, but the danger is existent.

BlueHost

BlueHost is one of the most popular hosting companies among WordPress users. It is among the three recommended hosting companies on WordPress.org’s website. It’s a great place for beginners to start out. One of the reasons for this is because the services are cheap, costing no more than $2.95 per month, which just about anyone can afford who’s looking to branch out online. If you can afford a sandwich a month, you can afford this too. Even if you’re just looking to start your first blog, it will work for you.

BlueHost also offers plenty of tutorial videos and a FAQ page where you’ll have most of your questions answered. If not, than you can just reach out to the customer support team. They aren’t the fastest, but you’ll have an answer in less than 30 minutes most of the time. BlueHost is used to working with beginners, so you’ll have some hand holding if you need it. But if you don’t want to tinker too much with your website and would rather have a group of experts handle it, you can. BlueHost a managed WordPress hosting plan that will keep your website up and running no matter what. All you have to do is pay the monthly bill (around $30) and have them install the updates, handle security threats and make sure that your website is performing well.

No matter what plan you choose you can always upscale when your business grows, so if the price suits you, BlueHost can be a great long term solution. They aren’t the best you can get for this money, but they’re very much decent.

InMotion Hosting

Even though I’m looking to make this as unbiased as possible, it’s hard for me not to be a bit excited about everything that InMotion has in store for its clients. They’re one of the few companies I’ve seen that don’t just make empty promises and offers but stick with a quality service from beginning to the end. What I like most about them is the fact that they give you every bit of your money’s worth, period. Their Business Hosting Service (shared hosting) costs $5.99 per month, which isn’t cheap by any means. But you get what you pay for most of the time and very few cheap services are actually good. At least you can rely on InMotion.

Their servers boast a solid uptime and ensure that websites operate on high speed. With a 99.99% uptime and 600 millisecond loading time, it’s hard to argue about quality. But anyone can run good servers and it isn’t the only place where InMotion shines. They also have an “Award Winning” customer support team. I’m not over exaggerating, because as far as our experience and other reviews are concerned, InMotion really does deliver one of the best if not the best customer support service in the industry. They take less than 2 minutes to respond and you’ll be talking to a friendly human being who will go out of his or her way to solve any of your issues.

So, InMotion is strong in all the core areas of web hosting, which are uptime, speed and customer service, but there’s more. They also went out of their way to give you a really awesome deal. You get plenty of free stuff such as SSD hosting, automated daily backups, website migration and a wealth of security apps and services. At least one or two of these four services are paid for at most companies, but you get them all for free. Some might argue that you actually pay for those with a $6 service, but I leave it to you to decide on that. At least here, you get what you’re promised without any disappointment.

To prove that InMotion is confident in what they offer, you have a 90-day trial period. You have three months to think about whether you’re satisfied with the service or not, and they’ll give you a full refund if need be. I find few things more important than trustworthiness when it comes to business, and this company fully embraces that.

HostGator

HostGator is a huge hosting company, one of the biggest players in the web hosting business. There’s a very good chance that you have seen more of their ads than you would have liked. That’s because they invest plenty of money into marketing themselves. The company has been around for 20 years now, and it doesn’t seem like it will leave the market anytime soon.

Few companies combine new technologies and a truly powerful service with cheap pricing. Which is why HostGator’s new service, the cloud hosting plan has made it to be #1 on plenty of trustworthy hosting review sites. Although HostGator has numerous shared hosting plans, I won’t talk about them because their cloud hosting plans are cheaper and way better. The HostGator Cloud Hosting service has an outstanding uptime and it offers high speed loading times. Cloud hosting is the most reliable hosting technology up to date. It boasts loading times as fast as 520 milliseconds. These are great numbers, when you consider that the service costs $2.99 per month. So, when it comes to technical reliability, this cheap little hosting plan can go head to head with the best of them. It also comes with free daily backups which is a major plus.

The only downside in choosing this plan is that HostGator has very inconsistent reviews when it comes to their customer support. Some say they had a pleasant experience while others say they had to wait for days or weeks to get a response. So stressing them, maybe calling in on a daily basis, would be a smart way to test them out during your 30 day trial period.

In short, this might be the perfect company to start your new website with, because their cloud architecture is incredibly fast and reliable to handle just about any website you would throw them.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is one of the world’s most famous domain registrars. The company has also been working in the web-hosting business for many years now. They offer some pretty solid hosting plans like managed WordPress hosting solutions that can spare you a lot of work if you’re starting a WordPress website.

GoDaddy’s entry level service isn’t the cheapest on this list. It starts at $4.00, per month, which is insanely cheap. They’ll also provide a free domain if you sign up for the annual plan. So it’s a pretty fair deal. But I did come across some ugly reviews where people expressed some extreme dissatisfaction. Yet as far as our measurements are concerned, their servers performed pretty well. They boast an average 99.04% uptime and a loading speed of 500 milliseconds. So their servers are pretty dependable. Their customer support team also offers a decent service. They take about 10 minutes to respond to your question and get on the way with solving any problem you might have. Overall, they’re worth checking out, but InMotion or HostGator still seem like a much better option to me. The decision is up to you.

Conclusion

Shared hosting plans is where all the beginners start their journey of building an online business or a simple website. It’s the cheapest hosting technology you’ll find and it will serve you really well if it’s combined with decent customer support and a few free features. So, it will be a really good option if you want to go easy on the old wallet.

I hope you have enjoyed reading through this article and that we’ve helped you learn something new today. If you’re curious about other types of hosting services and companies or maybe you need something more powerful, be sure to check out our other reviews as well. We cover everything you need to know about launching a website and marketing it.