Shared hosting is one of the most cheap options that is available to you. It is also pretty cheap for a reason.
The reason shared hosting can be offered so cheap is that there are other web sites hosted along side yours. If there is one server, it is then divided for everyone that wants to have a hosting account with that provider. That means that hosts that say you get unlimited resources for only a few dollars a month are not exactly being truthful with you. If the people all hosting sites on that single server use more resources than the server can handle, it will exceed the servers capabilities and the server will slow down or go offline.
Many web hosting companies will advertise that you get unlimited disk space as well as unlimited bandwidth. The reason they do this is to make money. They will load up their servers with lots of accounts and most of the time, no one will ever use all the resources. If they do however, that person will then be asked to upgrade their account to a VPS (virtual private server) or a dedicated server where it is just their site being hosted.
The speed of your server is very important when picking out a shared hosting account to get your site going with. It is important because if someone comes to your site and the site takes more than 10 seconds to load, they will probably go back and chose another site. No one wants to wait around forever for a single page to load. People are very impatient.
The second reason that you want to have a fast server is because it can affect your search engine optimization efforts. If you have a site that is very slow or perhaps sometimes offline, Google, Yahoo, and Bing will not favor that site. Why should it? If you were a search engine, would you favor a site that is not always online for visitors to click on? My guess is that you would not!
To get the best speed out of a server you need to check the following things when thinking about signing up for a hosting account.
- Location of the servers
- Age of all servers
- Quality of all servers
- Domains hosted on servers
- Traffic of sites on servers
