Shared
Hosting Reviewed
To Share or Not to Share?
When looking for a hosting solution
for your web site you'll discover you have the choice of shared or dedicated
hosting. This article will breifly explain the difference between them.
Shared hosting is what it says it is.
Your web site shares a server with other web sites. You don't have access
to the other web sites files, they don't have access to yours and you
don't share a domain name. What you do share is the machine and the scripts
that are pre-installed on it. Why would you do this?
Because it's cheaper.
As you can understand, the cost of
setting up a server machine is not inexpensive. Even relatively large
web sites are only a few hundred megabytes, so today's computers with
multiple hard drives are easily able to handle the space. There can be
as many as one or two hundred web sites on a shared server.
You'll find there are different platforms
available in shared hosting too. You will find you can have Unix/Linux
or Windows NT/2000 as your platform. You don't have to choose the platform
your PC is running. This has nothing to do with what the server needs
to operate on. Unix platforms are very stable and are perfect if you have
a site using mostly HTML pages, PHP or CGI. If you are using scripting
such as Active Server Pages, have designed your web site using FrontPage,
or need access to a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database, you need
a Windows platform.
Shared hosting usually comes with a
heap of extras and most are included in the price. You can get email,
auto-oresponders, pre-installed scripts including counters and mail scripts,
password protected directories, your own cgi-bin, browser based control
panels, secure directories and more. Check the options to see that you
are getting what you need.
However, if you need complete control
of your server, you need a dedicated server. Obviously if you're not going
to share the server with anyone, it is going to be more expensive.
Dedicated servers are usually only
required by experienced developers. If you're not sure if you need a dedicated
server, then you probably only need shared hosting. If you're in doubt,
contact the company you are considering hosting with and ask them about
their products in detail.
About the author:
Breal provides cost effective web site design and hosting with a full
30 day money back guarantee. Web hosting even comes with six months free
hosting on yearly accounts. To find out more visit http://www.brealweb.com
For a complete list of current articles, send any email to mailto:articlelist@brealweb.com
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