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Posts Tagged ‘reseller hosting’

Shared web hosting is still the most popular type of hosting online, although that will probably change in a few years when cloud hosting will be perfected and everyone will start using it in their datacenters. It is very cheap and if the physical machines are powerful enough and not too loaded, it’s enough for most small-to-medium applications that will have anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

If you are just starting out and you need a simple, easy to use hosting for your new site, forum, newsletter, e-shop or other online presence, you can easily go with shared web hosting.

Shared web hosting works very simply: a single, powerful machine (most datacenters nowadays use 4-8 processor cores, 8-16 GB of RAM and 2-3 500-1000 GB hard drives for this purpose, which is enough in 90% of all cases) hosts the accounts of 10-30 clients, with their websites, email accounts and everything else they might have.

The resources are distributed dynamically on a per need basis, and the theory is that it’s highly unlikely that all of the websites on the server will be hit by a lot of traffic at once, so most of the time; they are enough to keep a stable, high performance for all the clients. When a site gets to the front of Digg or other social network and starts receiving tons of visits, it uses more resources than usual, but because the other clients’ sites are mostly idle, they don’t notice anything.

If that site uses more than a certain amount of resources (which is set in the customer agreement), it is disabled until the owner does something to lower the load or moves to a VPS or dedicated server. This is the biggest drawback of shared hosting, but can be avoided by using a CDN (Content Distribution Network) like the free Coral CDN or paid MaxCDN (the latter gives you nice analytics and more control, but the former is good enough for basic use), which basically caches your pages on a whole network of servers that then serve them to your visitors, avoiding your shared hosting completely (and therefore, not loading your site).

Now that you understand what shared hosting is and how it works, let’s take a look at the best cheap and reliable web hosting companies and see what they have to offer.

1and1. With over 4 million customers and 5 datacenters all around the world, 1and1 is truly one of the leaders in the hosting industry. They have the cheapest prices and the most features per dollar you pay. I also like how they don’t say they offer unlimited everything (which is just impossible) like a lot of other companies do, but that will probably change. They offer various shared hosting plans from $4 to $20, with a lot of disk space and unlimited bandwidth (although it’s probably limited to about 3000-4000 GB per month, like most other companies). They have a great custom Control Panel where you can control everything (obviously from email to domains to transfer limits and billing. They also run frequent discounts of 50% or more percent for the first 3-6 months, which is great if you’re strapped on cash when you start out. Another great thing they do is give you $75-275 for AdWords, Yahoo and CitySearch, so you can use those vouchers to advertise your products. That can easily cover the hosting price for a couple of years!

HostGator. One of the most advertised hosting companies online, HostGator has offers for everyone. Starting at $4.95, they offer unlimited everything (which is not really true, but I guess they couldn’t compete with anyone if they advertised their real limits), and for the $12.95 plan, they give you a free dedicated SSL certificate, IP address and phone number, which would otherwise cost about $90, and is great if you need them (they can all be used for an e-commerce site, for example). They use the cPanel Control Panel, which is pretty standard and works well.

iWeb. Another great hosting company that makes it to the top lists and receives various awards every year, iWeb has a very good shared hosting offer, even if it’s more expensive: they offer a zero-downtime guarantee, which is achieved by having the shared hosting in a virtualized environment (i.e. a cloud) with a few redundant servers as backup. This is great news for anyone who knows how valuable every minute a site is available is. The rest of the offer includes 600GB which you can’t use for personal stuff (although you can probably host videos for your site), unlimited bandwidth and one domain for $1, which is nice. The cost is $1.67 per month, but only if you subscribe for 10 years. If you want to pay monthly, the cost is $7.77.

ix Web Hosting. This was and still is one of the best hosting companies for the last 10 years. Their current offers are between $6.95 and $12.95 (with a special discount of about 50% for all of them) and include free dedicated IPs (2, 3 and 15, which is just amazing, you could use them for SSL, cloaking, proxy sites and other things) and Adwords/Yahoo coupons ($100, $125 and $150). Not too bad, definitely worth checking out.

JustHost. This company has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of years, and users say that it’s quite good. They’re pushing the limit with their all-unlimited offer (which I believe isn’t true, as I said before), but the price and uptime are good enough, and the support is great, so they can be forgiven . They also give you a free domain with their $6.95 plan (now only $3.45, special promo offer), which is always a bonus.

Shared hosting is a great way to get your presence online and start a site, forum or anything else. It’s cheap, easy to use, doesn’t require a lot of manual configuration (unlike dedicated servers and VPS), and it’s powerful enough to hold a small or medium site with a few tens of thousands of visitors per month. Unless you need more control over your server, you can easily go with shared hosting.