If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.
-Paul Newman

A good shared host will take you a long way. Most of us will never have the traffic to really justify a dedicated server and it’s accompanying expense. In all honesty a quality shared host should be able to sustain a site that enjoys 1000+ uniques a day and around 50 gigabytes of bandwidth a month before excessive resource usage drives you to greener pastures. Those figures are daily averages from a site that I am involved with that is on a shared host. That site can at times see as many as 10,000 uniques a day, and those days do bring resource overusage shutdowns, but most days it runs just fine. That is a lot of traffic by most people’s standards, certainly enough for the vast majority of blogs.

So how do you pick a host from the hordes of hosts out there? A) What hosts offer quality service? B) Which oversell their servers? C) Which are simply reselling bandwidth from some crappy dedicated hosting provider?

First of all, stay away from the big names. They all fall into category B. All the big names that you are familiar with are probably cramming in the neighborhood of 800+ accounts on each server. Granted, most of those sites aren’t producing any kind of traffic, but just the weight of robot crawlers alone on a server that hosts so many sites puts a dimple in performance.

Also, why do you need 3 terrabytes of bandwidth and hard drive space when you probably will be using no more than a gigabyte of disc space and maybe 10-20 gigabytes of bandwidth a month? Obviously these aren’t hard and fast numbers; all our sites will produce varying numbers for traffic and bandwidth. The fact is, these overselling hosts are giving you these huge numbers and they are absolute bull@$#%. Nobody on a shared host needs these numbers. Do not be fooled.

What do we really want from a shared host? How about reliability and performance. Most blogs have modest requirements in terms of storage and bandwidth. Should be an easy task to provide a service that stays up and works, right?

Honest shared hosts do exist. You need to do a little research to find one, and the good ones aren’t charging any more than the big numbers companies. Like always, I recommend Web Hosting Talk as a good source of information. Just remember, a lot of the people there work for hosts, so don’t take everything as gospel unless you’re sure the poster doesn’t have an agenda. I am not going to bag on any providers here, but you’ll find the dirty on all of them there. Let’s just say that I am not happy with my current host and am moving in a month.

Here’s another tip: the free whois tool at DomainTools will tell you how many sites are hosted on a server and who the host is, so look up some of your favorite blogs that you think have good network performance and do a little research.

Also, don’t take a host that can’t run their own network. Once you have some prospectives lined up, ping and traceroute (tracert for you windows users) are your friends. Packet loss and high pings are just as bad for a web host’s performance as they are for a game server. A provider may be so far downstream of a major backbone that you might as well be running your site off your next door neighbor’s laptop. Low ping times, no packet loss, fewest possible hops are all a recipe for solid network performance. You can’t gauge what your readers in Malaysia will experience, but chances are if it works good for you that guy in Illinois is getting snappy performance too.

You can get quality blog hosting for $3-$5 a month, but you need to do a little homework. It’s a buyer’s market, and they all offer very similar services. They all want your business, and it’s also a good idea to sniff around for promo codes, because just about all shared hosts will give you 10-50% off a year contract, you just need to look for it. At this point we have all gotten pretty used to Cpanel and Fantastico. As much as I used to be against gui front ends to command line functions, both of these work and make life much easier for you whether you are a newbie or a veteran. Don’t settle for less to save a buck, make sure your host offers competitive services.

While I am not going to hype or slam any hosts in this article, feel free to do so, er, I mean share your experiences in the comments. If nobody settled for crappy web hosting they would all be forced to better the service they provide. Until then, shop smart and do your homework. You can find a good shared host that won’t break the bank.

Subscribe To RSS Feed Updates (What is RSS??)

Bookmark & Share

Related Posts

• Feedback: How Much Traffic Before Dedicated Hosting Becomes Necessary?
• Site Growth And Hosting Options
• Revisited: How Much Traffic Warrants Dedicated Hosting?
• Monster List Of Free File Hosting Services
• How To Create Your Own Hosted Blog Part II
• February Competition: Win Free Hosting!
• Free Hosting Competition Update