Web Hosting Reviews, Tutorials & News

Shared or virtual web hosting packages are the typical web hosting accounts for beginners and intermediate web site owners. Shared means the server on which the web hosting account resides is shared by many (up to hundreds or even thousands of) customers. This is generally the most economical and thus also the most popular type of hosting.

The web hosting provider provides the administration of the web server since it is shared by many users. Most regular web site owners wouldn’t want to care about the in depth tasks of server administration anyway, so this is a benefit for them. Power users however often require greater control over the system, i.e. “shell access” to perform command line operations or to install specific software (besides ordinary - php, perl, etc. - “scripts”, which usually shared customers can install, too). Those power users will often prefer a Virtual Server or even a Dedicated (= physically real) Server, both with root access to configure, remove and install whatever they want.

Shared web hosting accounts usually come with a specific web hosting control panel. The type of control panel offered by the hosting provider is often an important feature for intermediate web site owners since they are often used to “their” control panel (i.e. CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin…).

Types of web sites suited for shared / virtual web hosting:

Almost all web sites are suited to be run on shared web hosting accounts, with a few exceptions:

- Chat server applications: These usually consume too much server resources and require a dedicated server unless the chat is barely active.
- Wildly popular forums: These also usually require too much server resources at a certain size (i.e. hundreds of users online simultaneously).
- Other very active web sites if they are very dynamic. Dynamic sites are sites that are served live from a database on each request, opposed to “static” web sites which can serve much more visitors on the same server resources (CPU time and RAM memory) than a dynamic web site.

Shared web hosting providers:

There are thousands of shared web hosting providers and their sizes range from mom and pop operations to huge companies. Many of the small and very small outfits rent servers from bigger providers and resell them, often with added features or support. I personally tend to use mid sized to bigger providers and avoid the very big ones and the basement operations.

A web hosting control panel is an online interface provided by the hosting company for the configuration, maintenance and monitoring of a website. Web hosting control panels usually include these modules:

- Web site visitor statistics
- Available and consumed web space and transfer (bandwidth).
- Creation and configuration of databases, ftp accounts, email accounts, subdomains, domains, etc.
- Access control for (parts of) the web site
- Dozens of other modules depending of control panel used

Popular control panels are:

- CPanel: Probably the most popular web hosting control panel. Many features, can be overwhelming.
- Plesk: Similar to CPanel, almost as popular.
- DirectAdmin: Less features as the two mentioned before, but also popular, and might be easier to maintain for a beginner.
- Webmin: Free alternative, suited for maintaining a server with a single web hosting client.

Using the command line instead of a control panel:

- A web server (and - if a shell account is available - a web hosting account) can be configured and maintained without the use of a control panel. But even experienced webmasters will often prefer to use a control panel because it makes the day-to-day tasks of running a web site easier. No need to remember every single command. Using the command line for certain tasks is still possible even if a control panel is installed and running.

Which control panel to choose:

- I personally use webmin because I usually run servers rather than web hosting accounts. If I were to use a web hosting account my choice would be CPanel or DirectAdmin. CPanel because it is the most popular and there is a feature for almost every task. DirectAdmin because it is smaller and neater and also quite popular. I mention “popular” so often because I like to learn software only if it is sure to stay around. Also, if you use a “popular” control panel you are sure to easily find another host with the same panel when you’re changing your hosting provider which is something you’re going to do sooner or later. Finally, “popular” control panels are popular for a reason, many web hosting customers have voted with their feet. If you’re going to build your own web hosting company, CPanel would probably be the right choice. It will be easier to sell the company later on.