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Shared web hosting is often the best option to choose when you're ready to put your website online. However, the number and variety of web hosting options can be overwhelming. Let's try to cut through some of the confusion and see why shared hosting is usually your best choice.

Shared web hosting is often the best option to choose when you're ready to put your website online. However, the number and variety of web hosting options can be overwhelming. Let's try to cut through some of the confusion and see why shared hosting is usually your best choice.

Almost everyone starts out with shared web hosting. This is the most economical way to host your site. In this arrangement, you are sharing space with hundreds of other sites on one particular server. All sites on that server share the disk storage space and bandwidth for that server.

Most people who are publishing personal or home business sites will do just fine with shared hosting. These sites typically have moderate traffic levels and don't use a lot of file transfer resources, as a heavy multimedia (video) site would. Thus, their demand on the server at any given time is likely to be low.

While this won't happen with most shared hosting setups, it is possible for one or two sites to experience large traffic or bandwidth usage spikes, which can pull down the performance of other sites on that server.

If you put some really cool videos on your site and promote them heavily, this can result in a lot of traffic and a lot of bandwidth being consumed. Too much of this will affect the other websites hosted on the same server, and possibly cause slowed performance. The top hosts anticipate these issues, and have people on staff around the clock who monitor and adjust things as needed.

Great news - shared web hosting isn't expensive any more. It is very affordable for almost anyone. You can get reliable hosting for 5-10 dollars a month, which was unheard of a few years ago. Prices have dropped considerably. Go for a month to month plan at first, to see if your host's support and performance is acceptable. If it is, you can sign on for longer periods at discounted rates - an even better deal.

If you are also are interested in creating your own website from scratch, be careful with the hosting deals where you are offered site creation tools. Some of these are very easy to use and quite appealing, but a few are proprietary tools and should you choose to leave someday, moving your site to another host could be difficult. There are lots of excellent site creation tools out there that aren't tied into hosting plans - if you want to use this type of tool, this is your best bet.

For most people hosting personal or small business sites, shared web hosting is the most practical solution. You get everything you need in abundance, and you always have the option to upgrade your plan to a dedicated server should your site expand and require a higher level of service.