Advantages and Disadvantages for a Newbie

[trying hard]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of shared hosting for a newbie with no technical knowledge about web designs and web development?

[annamae]

One definite disadvantage with shared hosting has to do with sharing an IP address with other sites.  When you are sharing a server, you share an IP address.  If another site does something to get banned from a search engine, you are banned too.  A more common problem involves slow response time during heavy traffic hours.

[greeny]

Wow, really? I never knew before about the IP banning. Thanks Annamae for the info. So, the advanced search engine technology haven't been able to identify which website in a shared hosting server violates their rules, and they have to ban all websites there?

[dave]

Google / Yahoo / Bing no longer ban IP's. Arin requires that sites make every effort to use shared IP addresses these days because of the shortage of ip space on the internet.

An advantage to shared hosting is that the only thing you have to to worry about is your website, you dont have to try to figure out how to run a server.

Our shared hosting also comes with instant installation software for tons of applications like wordpress, joomla, forums. Basically you pick the software that you want to install and answer 4-5 questions abut how you want to site setup (title, admin email, etc) and click install and it does the rest for you, How easy is that?

[abender]

How many people share in a shared hosting server? Will it affect the speed of my website if all those people sharing have large amount of traffic? Is the division of resources equal to all people who sharing the server?

[dave]

We typically keep each server around 100 users but we have recently virtualized so the line gets blurry.

We watch all the servers and have several systems in place to makes sure that everyone gets equal opportunity to utilize the services resources.

[trying hard]

Other than the shared IP address that slows down with the traffic, is there any other disadvantage of shared hosting? I know one great advantage is the lack of monthly payments, but with the $1.99 monthly rate here, that is not a great advantage anymore.

[dave]

Shared hosting is easy and very inexpensive. Other solutions do require that you pay for server management or that you manage the server yourself.

Most of the internet uses shared hosting.

[abender]

Thanks Dave. I thought shared hosting is a VPS or a dedicated server that is shared by a few people. It never came to my mind that there are 100 people sharing in one server. That server sure is a very powerful computer.

What is the average payment for server management? Is it better to learn how to manage the server than paying for it?

[greeny]

Shared hosting is easy and very inexpensive. Other solutions do require that you pay for server management or that you manage the server yourself.
Most of the internet uses shared hosting.

I can't agree more with you. I like shared hosting, using which most things you need to do is uploading your website there. I am not server savvy, so managing a VPS or dedicated server myself is undoubtedly not my choice.   

[BettyBanner]

So really, there aren't any disadvantages for a newbie to share a server?

This is good, I think a lot of people would be confused as to which direction to go in. Is it possible to transfer everything over once you're more confident to start your own?

[dave]

We have had several resellers start out with our shared hosting and move to a VPS as their busines grew. Transferring accounts from 1 cpanel server to another is pretty simple so as long as you switch to a cpanel server you are good to go.