What is Shared Hosting?

Shared website hosting is where a hosting company will host more than one website on a server. This is a very common practice in the industry and almost every hosting company does this here is why. If a server costs $1,800 (a very lost price for a server, but it works for this blog post) and the hosting company has a policy that they need to have a return on their investment in one year, that means they would charge themselves $150 a month for that server. This means that if a shared hosting package is say $2, then they would to put at least 75 clients on that server in order to break even.

Now there are two ways to make money using this scenario. The first is to put the 75 clients at $2 a month and in a year, you will be making money on that server. Then there is the way that most companies work, which is to purchase cheap servers, put 300 or more clients on the server (some will stuff a thousand or more on a server) at $4 a month and you have paid for the server the first two months and you are making bank, at the cost of your customer’s satisfaction. These companies are not worried about retaining a customer, to them it is a revolving door and they can easily get a new customer with a little advertising, keep them for 3-6 months or maybe a year if there is a contract and then they can leave.

If you don’t care about your customers, then it isn’t a bad business model. You simply have them sign up for a year and every 3-4 months you do some advertising and do it again. So every few months you are getting a huge influx of new customers. You are making big money on the server and when a customer is ready to leave, you just let them leave.

Simply Web Services is of the mindset that we want to retain our clients so we do what we can to keep them. You will not find 300 accounts on any of our servers, you will not find expensive hosting costs and you will not find cheap servers. We invest in our clients, just like they are investing in us.

Is Shared Hosting Bad?
Shared hosting actually works well for most small to medium businesses and not-for-profit organizations. If your host is careful to not put high-traffic websites on a shared server, then this means that all the websites are using a small part of the server at any given time. This also means that not all the sites are active at the same time. Shared servers also often share email, which means that the shared hosting server also acts as a mail server for the website. This is how SWS is set up. This allows low-cost hosting to our clients and we are very careful to make sure that our servers are properly tuned and maintained.

If you are looking to host your website, give Simply Web Services a call at 540-479-6350