In our previous blog, we looked at some of the broad issues that you need to consider when deciding whether to opt for shared or dedicated web hosting. Today, we’ll look at some of the specific advantages and disadvantages of these two options.

Shared web hosting

Low cost

Shared web hosting is cheap – certainly, most UK web hosting companies offer packages from as little as £2/month including a free domain name and support.

Purchase-to-launch speed

If you have a ready website, shared hosting will allow you to launch it within minutes. Simply visit a web hosting provider’s website, choose and pay for a package and pretty much instantly you’ll receive your FTP login details allowing you to upload and launch your website immediately.

Shared IP

Every server connected to the Web has a unique IP address – a unique identity if you like.  This means that if there are a number of websites co-hosted on a server, they will all have the same IP address. Generally, this is not a problem.

However, if a co-hosted website was to persistently send out spam, the whole server could be blacklisted and effectively disabled taking your and all other co-hosted websites offline.

This is where you need to satisfy yourself that your web hosting company doesn’t host potentially spamming sites and also has robust monitoring software and procedures to ensure that any abusive activity is prevented before it impacts your website.

Speed / responsiveness

The more websites that are hosted on a server, the more requests that server has to deal with. Let’s say there are 20 websites hosted on a single server. If all those are currently being viewed by users, all requests for pages from those websites effectively have to queue up and be fulfilled in turn.

Now in reality, for small businesses with limited traffic (thousands of visitors per day) there is no noticeable change in performance. However, if many of these co-hosted websites were attracting tens-of-thousands of visitors per day, then it may well take a few extra second to load website pages. It is then perfectly possible that your customers will not wait around for pages of your website to load and may click away to your competitors.

Bandwidth and storage

While both of these elements will have set limits under shared hosting, most web hosting companies will allow you to increase these or upgrade to a higher package as your needs change.

Certainly, neither bandwidth nor storage hinder website performance. If you reach the limits of your package your web hosting company should automatically inform you and give you the opportunity to either reduce your usage / storage or simply upgrade.

SSL

Whether you have an ecommerce website or you simply capture customer details through your website, you will need to ensure that any information entered by your customers is encrypted. For this you will need SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption. It keeps data secure and also inspires confidence in your customers.

For shared hosting, a shared SSL encryption seems to the most common solution. In most cases, this is perfectly fine.

However, individual SSL encryption on shared servers can pose set-up challenges. It is, therefore, best to discuss this with your web hosting company to ensure that your needs can be fully met.

In summary, for the vast majority of small business websites including those with significant traffic, shared hosting is a perfect solution. It is certainly the right choice to start with and upgrade as your needs change. Eventually, you may well need to consider dedicated hosting.

In Part III, we will take a look at dedicated hosting in a little more detail.

Bandwidth · choosing a web host · Dedicated hosting · Dedicated web hosting · Shared hosting · Shared web hosting · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

The roads were eerily empty and quite on Sunday afternoon when England clashed with Germany for their World Cup battle. While one form of traffic disappeared from the roads, another form of traffic was clogging up the superhighway.

In fact, as the Mercury touched 30 degrees and baked the exposed tarmac, online traffic too was creating significant heat amongst web hosting servers streaming live games.

While we await the England-Germany online viewing figures, the BBC saw an increase of 31% in traffic during the England-Slovenia encounter causing some visitors to its website to miss the action. However, ITV has faced considerable criticism of its failure to handle high levels of online traffic from the very start of the World Cup.

Now, I don’t expect that most small companies have to worry about this sort of strain on their servers. However, you might need to keep an eye on your website traffic numbers especially if your business has peaks in activity. It’s worth a chat with your web hosting company to establish their contingency plans in case of any spikes in traffic.

In the meantime, now that our old foe has once again sent us packing for home from a major tournament, perhaps we can enjoy the rest of the World Cup without the emotional roller coaster that comes with supporting England.

Mind you, we do still have a Brit in the quarter finals at Wimbledon – bring on the Murray Mount!

Bandwidth · Online traffic · Web Hosting