Top Shared Web Hosting Providers in 2024

Shared Hosting, The First Step Towards Establishing an Online Identity

An abundance of hosting companies, a wide variety of hosting plans, attractive prices, and obscurity of technical terminologies make the selection of the right hosting environment quite confusing and challenging for a website owner.

The quality of the WebHost defines the future of every website. If the site fails to render a seamless experience to the users, it will irritate the customer and reduce user engagement levels. Low levels of user engagement will lower your SEO ranking, and it, in turn, will reduce your search visibility.

Similarly, hosting a low — traffic website on an expensive dedicated environment wouldn’t be feasible due to the increase in operational expenditure.

So identifying the right host with the right resources for your website’s optimum performance is as crucial as choosing the domain name. For some, the cost could be the guiding star, while for some, the technical features become the decisive element.

Everyone wants to host their websites on high performing, blazingly fast, robustly secure, and well-reputed servers. But such environments often require high maintenance costs much beyond the majority of the website owners’ financial liberties.

It makes economical hosting packages for beginners such as Shared Hosting, a favorite among a large section of website owners such as individuals, startups, primary e-commerce sites, and community websites.

Shared Hosting Services

Here you share the server resources with others on the same server. The shared hosting provider recovers the expenses to manage the server by charging a hosting charge for each inhabitant.

The cost per account is relatively lower due to the high number of shared hosting accounts on the server. The low ownership cost attracts customers, and it makes shared hosting the most popular hosting types among its siblings. Among the hosts, Bluehost shared hosting services and Hostinger shared hosting services have comparatively higher users.

Shared Hosting Advantages:

Cost-efficiency, flexibility, and ease of management are the primary reasons that gravitate customers to this fold.

  1. Cost Efficiency

Shared hosting is an entry-level hosting plan that targets first-time website owners or low traffic websites. Every WebHost tries to lure customers with a wide range of options within the shared hosting category to suit each customer’s requirements. It encourages people to own a website without any substantial spending and boosts the growth prospects of the entire web hosting industry.

  2. Flexibility

For a beginner, a basic shared hosting plan with minimal resources such as disk space and bandwidth would be sufficient. As you grow, better resource allocations and additional features such as SSL or CDN are inevitable.

If your host is incapable of providing the required features, it will hamper your growth. Typically shared hosting is just one among the various types of hosting offered by the web hosting provider. It makes them competent to switch you to a higher plan whenever required and help you continue your an unabated growth, without any interruptions.

  3. Ease of Management

For the majority, the fear of managing the websites makes them apprehensive about starting a website. But hosting control panels such as cPanel, Plesk, or DirectAdmin provides a feature-rich interface for the user to manage his account in an uncomplicated way.

The interface is self-explanatory and allows one to manage emails, databases, or FTP users in a hassle-free way. One can easily install and configure a plethora of applications, such as Joomla, WordPress, Magento, etc., through its one-click installer tools such as Fantastico or Softaculous.

The ability to make websites through a few mouse clicks without any need for downloading, installation, and configuration makes website creation and maintenance quite simple even for a novice.

The host undertakes the complete management of the server. It relieves the user from the routine server management worries and helps him focus more on his business.

Disadvantages of Shared hosting:

Shared hosting fuels the majority of the websites today. But even premium shared hosting providers fail to impress a significant number of website owners in different aspects. Some of the drawbacks of shared hosting are:

Slow Websites

Website speed is a crucial parameter of customer engagement and good SEO rankings. So people prefer the fastest shared hosting environment to host their websites.

But on a shared server environment, you split vital resources such as CPU or memory with your neighbors in a logical way. Your noisy neighbor with resource-hungry applications could cripple the entire server and make your website sluggish.

Security Threats

By default, control panels offer an excellent level of security for your account. Also, a user can’t make any access or modifications to sensitive files. However, in reality, shared servers are more vulnerable to security threats than other hosting categories.

Most of the clients in the shared environment don’t perform the regular maintenance of their websites or applications such as WordPress and make the applications vulnerable. Hackers exploit these vulnerabilities to perform malicious activities such as spamming, DOS, etc.

Identifying your server as a source of an attack will invite stern actions from the data center, such as IP blacklisting or null routing of the server, which can lead to reputation damages. Bluehost shared hosting is the best shared website hosting solution if give higher priority to security.

No Customization 

A shared server will have a predefined set of features and software. All accounts on that server have to restrict themselves with the package features. You can’t make any customizations, modifications, or install any additional software for your website.

It is a major let down for technology enthusiasts as they lack the necessary privileges to execute a script or software in a real-time environment.

Resource Restrictions 

Each shared hosting account will have a ceiling for its resources such as Bandwidth, Disk Space, email accounts, Data Bases, etc., based on the package.

Unless you keep a regular tab on these parameters, especially with Bandwidth, there are high possibilities for getting your website suspended due to exceeding the bandwidth limitation. It creates embarrassing situations with your clients, especially during campaigns.

Overselling

Price plays a crucial role in shared hosting, and each company competes to gain customers through predatory pricing. They achieve this by crowding the servers with heaps of accounts much beyond the capacity of the hardware.

It enables them to get maximum Return on Investments at the cost of innocent customers, grappled by the website’s poor performance and frequent down times.

Support: 

Quality hosting providers seldom segregate the support quality with your hosting plan. Even then, the lack of administrative level access creates some issues for a tech-savvy user. You need to contact the support department for every modification, and it is a time-consuming process.

Cheap hosts try to reduce their operational costs by deploying less experienced people for their support, and it delays the resolution. Besides, the less competent server administrators are a potential threat to your data security and continuous website availability.

Best Suited For: 

Personal Websites, Blogs, Company Websites, simple eCommerce stores with predictable traffic

Not Recommended For: 

Streaming Websites, Corporate websites, Portals, multi-layered e-commerce stores, and websites with good traffic and resource requirements.

How to choose the right shared hosting company for your website?

The host plays a crucial role in defining the speed, accessibility, and performance of a website. So one shouldn’t leave any stones unturned in his pursuit for a reliable Web Hosting provider.

Some of the dependable parameters in choosing the host are:

Cost 

Not all expensive hosts are excellent hosts. Similarly, extremely cheap hosts can’t deliver exceptional services. So always consider a balanced approach based on your financial liberties and requirements. Recommended Hostinger shared hosting plans for begginers.

 Infrastructure 

A server that uses SSD servers will have better speed, performance, and fault tolerance than HDD servers. Most of the premium shared hosting providers will have data centers spanning across different locations to ensure quality service and risk mitigation.

Speed

Website speed depends on several factors, such as network latency, server performance, and, most importantly, code optimization. A non-optimized website, even on the fastest shared hosting environment, will be sluggish.

Hosting your website on servers with minimal geographical distance with your customers and employing caching systems such as CDN are some practical strategies to improve website speed.

Reputation 

Often people get mesmerized by the uptime values alone while choosing a host. Uptime is a good indicator of server performance, but a good host should be reliable, continuously available, and possess an excellent support team.

It is practically tough to gauge these parameters without actually subscribing to their services. As a web hosting consultant, we perform a detailed evaluation of various performance indicators of each host and rank them so that a user can identify the suitable host for him.

One can quickly check the host’s reputation by visiting https://thewebhostingconsultant.com/  to get accurate information about their service quality.

Package Features

The majority of the features of shared hosting would be identical among different hosts. But if your host offers advanced features such as the LiteSpeed Webserver, SpamExperts email filter, or Immunify360, you can confidently go with those hosts.

They will have the necessary expertise, industry exposure, and resources to enhance your growth.

Backup Management 

No host can assure you complete immunity from a server crash or data loss. Ironically, only very few hosts alone maintain proper backups of the client data.

Before subscription, check whether your host maintains daily, weekly or monthly backups with a reasonable retention period.

Support 

Shared hosting doesn’t provide any back-end access to server resources to the user. So one has to depend on the support team frequently whenever he experiences any issues or needs any modifications. The support team should be knowledgeable, easy to communicate, and responsive.

Most companies blind the customer with the impressive response time. But in reality, the canned replies never make any tangible result towards issue resolution.

So always check the support rating for your host on https://thewebhostingconsultant.com/ before making a decision.

 Scalability

Shared hosting is just the first step towards the online world for all companies. As you grow, you will receive more traffic, and it may break your bandwidth ceiling. Your host should have the necessary provisions to improve such allocations on a real-time basis without affecting your services. So choose best shared web hosting service for your website in primary stage itself.

Once you have outgrown shared hosting, you need to move to higher plans such as cloud hosting, VPS, or dedicated hosting. Always try to get a host that can fulfill your future requirement in an efficient, seamless, and hassle-free way.