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.

This is a simple question to answer. You need paid web hosting because it simply is better than free hosting. Free hosting is crap, its garbage. Free hosting is good if you’re 13 years old and you want to start up your first website about Pokémon cards. Sure you might need a free web host if you want to start up some sort of illegal website too. But, not all of us are starting out, and not all of us are looking to hone our blackhat skills.

This is where paid hosting comes into play. Paid web hosting is the best you can get. There isn’t anything better, no matter how hard you look. I’m sure you could find a web host that pays you to host your site there, but good luck doing that.

Paid hosting allows you to have a lot more flexibility in what you want to do. You can host more domains with paid hosting. You can have unlimited space, and bandwidth. You can install scripts with a few clicks using Fantastico. You can’t do any of that with stupid free hosting. Sure free hosts may offer you the world, but what do you really get in return? Absolutely no customer service, really slow servers, and ads all over your website.

With all of these nuisances that come attached to free hosting, they make your website look cheap. Obviously it looks cheap, you paid nothing for it. It’s really easy to spot a web page that is hosted with a free service as well. Their webpage will be put in some sort of subdomain of the free host. Either that or it will have its own folder, after the main domain. If you plan on branding your own website or even your own product, good luck doing that on a free host. If you tell someone to go to xfreehost.com/mybrand they won’t even care about your brand, all they remember is xfreehost and that they should sign up for their own account soon.

Paid hosting allows you to have your own domain name. This gives you a huge advantage because if you find a short, pronounceable domain that you can brand – you’re set. Not to mention once you sign up for your own domain, you can get emails that have that as their domain as well. This allows you to make emails for support, billing, etc. Makes you look more professional, which could get you sales and make some profit.

Ultimately you want to find a web host that offers what you need. Some hosts offer ASP hosting, which is run on Windows servers and is more expensive compared to Linux hosting. Look for what you need, and remember to read reviews before you buy.

If you are looking for your first time hosting to put your attempt at making a web site public, or you are an expert, you can always use the advice to make sure that you get the right web hosting plan for your particular situation.

The first thing that you have to look at is the platform for the web server. The majority of web hosting services run with either Windows or Linux/Unix. The choice for what one you use is based on the technology aspect that is implemented to build your web site. If you are using stuff like ASP or VB to create your web site, you will use a Windows server because that is technology with Microsoft. On the other hand, if you are using stuff like PHP or Perl, you will use a Linux/Unix based server because these are ‘open source’ technologies.

The next thing that you have to look at are the features that are offered on the plan. After you figure out if you are using Windows or Linux/Unix, you will have to look through all of the different features and decide which ones are more important to you. There are more features being added to plans on a daily basis but only some of them are very important.

Below is a list of some of the most important features to make sure that you have on your plan in good proportions.

Disk Space

Bandwidth

Backups

Uptime

Domains Allowed

Databases (Number & type)

CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI

Cron

The list is virtually endless but those are just a few so you can get the idea of what to look for. You will have to make sure that the web hosting plan you are getting your web site on is going to work out in the long run because it can be hectic when you run into a problem because of your limitations.

The next thing that you will have to look at is the cost. While most plans are not really that expensive (starting from around $2-4/month for the lowest plan), the average webmaster will probably dish out around $10/month for fees for a simple web hosting plan.

Some people will base their decision on what plan to get based on the cost only – don’t do this! If you are really on a budget, you should go for the second cheapest deal because the cheapest deal is usually a big waste of money. You are getting yourself into stressful downtimes, slow loading speeds, extra hidden fees, and a lot of pains in the ass if you put money in front of quality.

You can pay by the year to get a discount at most hosting providers and that is totally your decision. If you know that the specs of that host are perfect for you, that won’t change, and 12 months down the road, you still need the service – go for it if you can afford it at the time.

Going down the line, customer service is rather important and most of the bigger hosting companies don’t offer a good customer service. The one on one assistance is usually a lot better with the small and private hosting companies but they are usually not as strong of a service. You should have 24/7 service all year round with your plan, don’t expect anything less for your money because your web site has to be up all the time. This means assistance via phone, email, or live chat.

You should research the experience that the web host has and see other peoples past experiences to make sure that it is a reliable host. A lot of the time, the most well known hosts are not the best bet so you look for the mid-sized ones and have to do a bit of extra research so you don’t get yourself into a mess. Statistically, almost all web hosting companies end up closing in under a year – maybe 1-2% actually survive.

An important thing is also the uptime that the web hosting plan offers. It is true that a web host can not stay up all the time because servers will need to get rebooted for safety reasons, software upgrades and a few other reasons. Web hosts that don’t update frequently are risking themselves in being hacked so you should expect that you don’t get 100% uptime but you should get pretty close to it. The 99.9% uptime guarantee is what is floating around a lot, expect no less.

This article has delivered you a list of some of the most important things to look for in a web hosting plan – use it to your advantage.

Web hosting companies throughout the Internet offer you the ability to make your web site able to be accessed by everybody throughout the World Wide Web. There are a lot of companies offering web hosting services and there are a lot of specifications that make a certain web host better than another so it may be difficult. These web hosting companies offer the hosting service and also offer the basic Internet connection inside one of their data centers. There are a variety of web hosting companies out there and a lot of them have different stuff to offer. The two main hosting services available are the free and paid web hosting companies.

With the free web site hosting companies, you can put up your content on the server which is made available by the company for no charge. This would be great to people who are really new to the game, want to get used to the process of creating web sites before making the step, or are not looking to get too serious in the game. For any professional web site, it is suggested that you only use a paid hosting service because of the variety of choice. Free web site hosting usually means that there are annoying ads on the page and a limitation to what content can be on the site and in what mass.

If you want to keep your web site strictly on a professional level, take your presence seriously, and need a larger web space (in most cases you will), you should go for a paid web hosting service. If you expect to get much traffic at all, you will really need to get paid hosting because a free web hosting service usually can’t handle very much attack on the bandwidth.

With paid hosting services, they are still easy to manage – even for beginners. A lot of them include various programs which can really help you out when you are setting things up like the ability to automatically set up a WordPress blog without the need of doing all the coding work – Fantastico is a great addition to a lot of web hosts. The great thing about it for the very small web sites, even a cheap web hosting service from a place like GoDaddy is sufficient. If you are on the larger side, you may be forced to get your own dedicated server but that would rarely be the case.

The paid hosting services probably won’t provide step by step tutorials for everything but some of the free hosting services will do that as an extra incentive and this makes it even better for newbies. The main issue with the free web hosting services though is (besides the space limitations) that they make you place ads and banners on your web site and they take up a bit of advice and are annoying – you usually can’t adjust any of the coloring so it could clash very badly with the colors on your web site.

The revenue of the ads and banners goes directly to the hosting company and some of the free web hosting services don’t allow you to post any ads at all so making money from your web site would be limited to an alternative income stream. Usually it will be a domain like yourdomain.freewebhosting.com and that isn’t exactly intriguing for most web sites.

The verdict would be that a personal web site could work on a free web hosting server but if you are looking to have a professional web site and take things serious, you should at least chip in a few bucks a month to use a paid web hosting service.