I’m going to get a hosting with high bandwidth and I see many shared web hostings with high (500 GB) bandwidth but I”ve no idea what exactly they are and if they are reliable. Please help me choose a right hosting. I’ve been looking for a web hosting and found these two interesting: www.1and1.com and www.webhost4life.com
So please let me know about your experience and information in this case…
Thanks, MOhammad.
Shared hosting is Web hosting in which the service provider serves pages for multiple Web sites, each having its own Internet domain name, from a single Web server. Most Web hosting companies provide shared hosting. Although shared hosting is a less expensive way for businesses to create a Web presence, it is usually not sufficient for Web sites with high traffic. These sites need a dedicated Web server, either provided by a Web hosting service or maintained in-house.
Shared web hosting means that your website is hosted on the same server as many other websites. This means you can’t have root (admin) access to the server beyond your own site configuration. You are also usually limited on how many processes you can run, and they will usually charge you more if you tried to run something like a jabber (chat) server.
You might find you will also have problems if you try to set up something like an ssl (https) connection to your server, depending on your webhost.
For most sites though, shared hosting works. It allows you to install any sort of php application (web forums, photo galleries, Content management systems etc). You get ftp, sftp and depending on the host webdav and other upload systems.
I run a couple of sites of one shared hosting account and it works fairly well for me. Of course, beyond that there’s VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and Dedicated servers. VPS hosting is a sort of middle ground, where you might share server resources (such as cpu time and ram) with another server, but you get root access to your virtual server and can run (practically) whatever you want.
These can be a bit more expensive though. Dedicated server hosting is only for people who have a lot of clients already and are looking at hosting them themselves. Or for companies with other requirements that go beyond Shared/VPS hosting.