Shared hosting
To Share or Not to Share a Web Host?
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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,
autoresponders, 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.
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copyright Breal Web Design 2003
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
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Article reproduced with kind permission
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