Shared Web Hosting

Posted by expeedtech on May 30th, 2013

Shared web hosting is by far the most common form of web hosting within Australia and around the world. It is tailored more towards simple web sites that can be set up quickly with the minimum of expense and technical expertise.


Customers will be allocated space and resources on one or more servers of their hosting company rather than an entire server for their needs. Those servers are shared with other customers – often hundreds of others – all using the server resources at the same time. There are benefits and limitations with shared web hosting as there are with any other form of Web Hosting Package.


The benefits of shared web hosting


There are a few over-arching benefits of a shared web hosting solution for hosting a web site: firstly, there is the lower cost. The web hosting provider uses the same server or servers to service many customers, and by extension, many websites. Therefore, they are able to recover the costs incurred for those server resources from a greater number of customers, hence the cost to each individual customer is substantially lower. By extension of the fact that a hosting provider has provisioned and made available their servers, they have also put in place all of the required extraneous infrastructure required to make those servers available on the Internet and correctly secured.


Secondly, there is a much lower requirement of technical expertise required on the part of the customers. The complexities of making the server work, and keeping it updated and online are abstracted from the user completely; their only requirement is to place their website files in the correct place for it to become available on the Internet.


The limitations of shared web hosting


With ease of use and lower costs come limitations with a shared hosting solution. These limitations are in place to protect all of the users of the server resources as effectively as possible. One of the main ways in which the security of all users on the servers is maintained is by restricting the operations that an individual user can complete on the server. Therefore, with a web site hosted on a shared server, a customer will only have access to their own folder and will only have limited privileges within that folder. Web sites need to be built taking into account these limitations in security and user privilege.


A side-effect of the limitations placed upon a user in a shared hosting environment is that in turn, the components used by a web site may also be limited to those that only access resources within their local folder, and do not depend upon other components to which they may not have usage permissions. It is always wise to check with a hosting provider which components they already have available and whether a specific component is going to be permitted.


Finally for corporate users, there may be company or industries policies in place that prohibit the placing of web site files and/or data on a shared web server for security reasons.

Author Bio:

Michael Collins is a Manager at Expeed Technology. He is vastly experienced in ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Web Hosting, SQL Server, Azure. His company Expeed Technology is a provider of premium Australian web hosting services focusing on Microsoft technologies. They provide- web hosting, email hosting, Virtual Servers, hosted Exchange and hosted SharePoint.

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expeedtech
Joined: May 17th, 2013
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