Hosting
Your Company On A Shared Web Hosting Platform
Hosting Your Company On A Shared Web Hosting
Platform
For the majority of small businesses and webmasters a paid-for,
shared web hosting program makes the most sense, rather than free
hosting or a dedicated server. Most free hosting platforms are flexible
enough to allow the kind of ‘brochureware’ site that
straightforward promotions require, but the chances are you would
have to put up with external advertising on your site - which is
hardly going to do your brand a lot of good. At the high end of
the price range, a dedicated server for a small promotional site
would be needlessly extravagant.
So a shared service - in which your website sits on a server along
with the sites of dozen or hundreds of other enterprises - is usually
the most cost-effective compromise. It can have its drawbacks, the
classic case being when a problem with a single site crashes the
whole server. But for most website owners who simply wish to promote
an offline business - or even run small to medium scale ecommerce
operation - shared hosting remains the most efficient and economical
option.
So what should you look for in a shared host? Most companies that
offer shared hosting plans have to make delicate trade-offs between
security and flexibility. You should look for one that seems to
have the two in balance and also offers a good price - these days
‘good’ usually means just a few dollars a month for
50-100Mb of space.
The first thing about a shared hosting provider you should check
out is the level of access they offer to your server space. This
boils down to whether or not you will be permitted to install your
own ‘backend’ programs like databases and shopping carts.
If they offer you unrestricted remote access to tinker around with
what you want, that’s excellent from a flexibility point of
view - you or your web designer can upload files and processes easily
- but this is less desirable from the point of view of security.
Why? Because it means other businesses who are sharing your server
could install unstable, badly-written software or, even worse, viruses
or spyware. This is where the trade-off comes: you want the flexibility
to install programs on the server - or even if you don’t right
now, you may wish to expand into ecommerce in the future. But you
don’t want your site hosted on a shared server where access
is a complete free-for-all.
That’s why most shared hosts offer packages - add-ons to
your site that range from simple mail forms to fully-featured shopping
carts. The shared host’s staff installs these, or at the very
least carefully supervises and checks their installation. Many shared
hosts allow you to shop for features. For example, if you want a
simple brochureware site you only buy the website space. If you
want surfers to be able to check out your products, you can add
a database. If you want them to be able to actually buy online,
you can add a shopping cart.
This flexible approach, combined with great-value pricing, is the
sign of a good shared host. It allows you the flexibility to develop
your site according to the needs of your business, while offering
peace of mind that the chances of major downtime will be greatly
reduced.
About the Author This article first
appeared on http://www.swathosting.com website
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