Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting around. It is efficient, and gives you a great amount of disk space and bandwidth for your site. However, shared hosting is not for all sites.

For example, shared hosting can easily be used on a site like this. (This site does not use an extreme amount of Bandwidth and/or disk space.) However, for a site like YouTube that gets an enormous amount of visitors, uses dedicated servers.

Shared hosting is quick, cheap and reliable. In my opinion, the best place to start off with shared hosting is Hostgator. Hostgator is great for starters using Shared hosting. It’s clean, and has a very user-friendly interface. It uses cPanel, which is a great application to manage your files, bandwidth, disk space etc. The cPanel application looks like this. When purchasing Shared hosting with Hostgator, you can enter in coupon codes to get you a little discount. These coupon codes can be found all over the place, but my best suggestion is this website. All of the codes from this website should work, and they are very helpful to save you a few extra bucks. However, keep in mind that if you just want to test if a coupon works or not, and enter it in, but do not use it, it will not work later on in your account. So be sure you have chosen what you need and are ready to checkout before entering coupon codes.

Shared hosting can be registered with many other hosting companies. Most of the hosting companies nowadays use cPanel, as it is very well known and easy to use. There are some hosting companies that do not use cPanel, but I do not recommend them, because when you have shared hosting, and you do not have cPanel, you are going to be in trouble unless you somehow find a big tutorial on using their other application. Hostgator has the cheapest prices of shared hosting out of every single hosting company. I have done research on this, and yes, it is true. I know people who currently use Hostgator to host their websites. Hostgator is great, and there are many companies in competition with Hostgator, one of them is Fatcow, which is also a great company.

Normal text will take a very little amount of space on the server and is virtually unnoticed in most cases. Images will take a lot more space than text and having audio or video will definitely show a lot of damage in your space available on the server.

The amount offered by the web hosting company will probably look like a lot but once you start adding stuff, it will really start to get a lot smaller very quickly. There could be server plans offering 500mb, 1gb, or even more for storage and bandwidth but this is probably a lot of nonsense for you and you don’t really understand – the bigger the better? You should not be judging the best plan on the storage amount alone – a 5mb storage space can be more than enough for you to have ten web sites with about 5 pictures. You can calculate roughly the amount of space that you need on the server very easily.

First off, you have to understand that there is a big difference between the two terms ‘bandwidth’ and ‘data transfer’ before we proceed. Bandwidth basically measures the size of the web site (maximum capability) and the data transfer measures the amount of data able to be transferred through the web site. They go hand and hand though because if you need to transfer a lot of data, you will need a high bandwidth server plan.

Having a hosting plan that contains a high data transfer amount but has a low bandwidth can lead to some serious issues because it could cause the site to slow down to the point that no one will ever visit it again – this usually occurs after you start to get a lot of traffic. The problem is that what you are actually permitted to transfer is okay but the bandwidth will not permit that much information to be transferred continuously.

For you to keep the bandwidth usage at a minimum, you will really have to slow down on the complex additions to your web site and keep it really simple. You shouldn’t use big picture, minimize the use of them if you can, try to stay away from videos, and use friendly formats for your text.

If you don’t quite understand what plan you need best, a lot of the web hosting companies explain which plan is best for each situation.