By far the most affordable means to get your website on the internet nowadays is to use what is called shared hosting. Shared hosting is where a net hosting company rents you a certain amount of disk space in which to store the files that make up your website and allow you a certain quantity of bandwidth (ie. the data transfered between your web site and your visitors browsers) in exchange for a monthly fee. Usually speaking, the more you pay the more web space and bandwidth you’ll be given.

There are even deals around where you are offered ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth for a ridiculously tiny sum of cash every month. Lots of individuals are pleased with what they get, however many others have discovered when actually trying to use substantial amounts of space or bandwidth that if it sounds too good to be true then it typically is!

One of the features of a shared hosting account is that, because it’s name implies, you are sharing the disk space and bandwidth with heaps of different users. As I’m positive many can appreciate, when an application is thrashing your hard disk on your own PC, or using up a lot of memory, then your PC slows down significantly and will seem to grind to a halt at times. Well, this situation is just about the same with shared hosting. You can find yourself on a server with other users who have memory or CPU intensive applications, or well-trafficed sites that have tons of visitors, which means tons of disk activity. The end result is that the responsiveness of your website is affected.

A further problem with shared hosting is that you may be unaware of who precisely you are sharing with. If you discover that your site drops suddenly in Google that might be because you have done something Google doesn’t like. On the other hand it may be that the IP address you are sharing with all the other sites on your server has been identified as a cause of spam or malware.

So what’s the solution?

Well lots of individuals are OK with taking the risks related to shared hosting, but for others some sort of cheap dedicated hosting provides an occasional cost response to their problems. You’ll would like to come to a decision if you need Linux server hosting or Windows server hosting, but that decision ought to be driven by the applications that you wish to run, as they can likely be Windows only or Linux only.

A virtual dedicated server is the next step up from shared hosting and can cost you a touch more money. With a virtual shared server you still won’t have a physical server all to yourself, but you’ll have much more control over your hosting environment and you’ll eliminate nearly all of the issues associated with shared hosting, and you will have your own IP address. For the little amount extra (it can be sometimes around $twenty – $30 per month extra) that a virtual dedicated server costs this is a worthwhile investment.