Am I a fool If I use shared Hosting Services?

Should we host our websites on our own or go to a hosting company? It's almost always that, one gets confused after completing his website. However, if we think analytically we can always find which option is best suited for us. We will take the most common example to do comparison of these options. Many a times in this article, the phrases "rented hosting" and "shared hosting" have been used interchangeably, but they do make sense at these places.

Let us say you are a brilliant programmer. You know PHP (or java or C or C++ or anything) very well. You have lots of experience in your favorite subject and you like to give tips and provide real time solutions to your colleagues. Some true friends of yours, suggest you why do not you go online and earn some name and fame. (I will write another article in near future which will make you earn money also if you are such a pro). Now as you yourself are a pro, you create a fantastic website. In this website you have written several tips, tricks and hacks and at the same time how to avoid being hacked etc.

You have created your website. Now this website is useless for others... off course, until they can access it. To make your website available to others, you need to publish your website over the internet. By publishing your website means, the pages you have created can be accessed from anywhere using internet.

You have two options.

Self Hosting - Make the laptop or personal computer you own a web server.
Rent out some one else's machine and put your content on the rented machine

Now let us see the pros and cons of each of the above two options against the following parameters.

• Security
• Speed [Response Time, Download Time]
• Disk Space
• Bandwidth
• Software
• Technical Support
• Accessibility: Ease of Use

Security
When you host your website on a machine you own, You are sure that no one else can temper with the articles you have written. If you have some databases, you have full access to your databases also.
-If you have hosted you website on a rented machine the contents are prone to being modified, deleted or changed by the hosting company.

However, In practical situation, if you have hosted your website with a reputed hosting company, you can be sure that there will not be any interference from the owner of the machine unless you violate their rules and norms. With the type of content you have written, which you, anyway, are going to make available to everyone why bother about such things.

If you self host your website, you have the responsibility to get the security updates, antivirus etc. Also, it becomes your responsibility to guard against hackers.

Speed [Response Time, Download Time]

If you are hosting your website on your own machine, the speed should generally be great. Mostly the speed will depend whether you have made your machine a full time web server or not. If you use some CPU consuming applications, the response time of your website might be hindered. However normally the response time will be better than that when you share the rented machine with some one else.

This is because whoever rents his machine, he might have rented the same machine to hundreds or sometimes thousands of websites. This should be very evident from the fact that many websites sell space of 10Mb per website. Now-a-days a typical computer has almost 250GB of hard disk space. Out of this if we set aside 20GB or even 50GB disk space for any web application or the operating installed, we are left with at least 200GB of hard disk space. Divide this disk space with 10Mb. You come with a value of 2000! Now think yourself which machine will give better response time yours or the rented one. In some cases where the web hosting solution providers promise a disk space of 1GB, your website has to share the machine with 200 other ones.

Are you having the feeling that the shared webhosting is not good? Wait a minute, When you are going to publish your website you have to consider several things. It is very much likely that the hardware used on the servers provides the web hosting service provider would be superior that yours. Also always keep in mind that the machine the websites is dedicated to this purpose only. So it might not be a very bad idea to consider shared web hosting. Lastly in your case the content (textual+logo) is not going to be more than 25-30 kb. So the download time will automatically be lesser. If you still have doubt, you can register for the free trial hosting plans to get an idea of the speed. Most of the hosting companies give you free hosting for some time. Once you feel confident, go ahead and register for the paid plan. Afterall, there is harm in trying.

Disk Space

Here the self hosting is undoubtedly superior to the rented one but only if you are going to consume a lot of disk space. Typically a website on internet having adequate pictures and flash will not exceed 150Kb. A good content-only website will be less than 50Kb in size. In the 150Kb page almost 80% i.e 120-1255kb will be the static content like the logo, JavaScript files, CSS files which are used on every page. So, If you have a 100 page website, The total size requirement comes around to be 25*100+125 i.e 2.5Mb only! Now see yourself, how much the disk space is important!

The above estimation, is assuming that your website is not a picture or video website. In that case space will become more important. As now-a-days one single good quality picture can take almost 1to 2 Mb disk space. No comments on disk usage required for a videos website. Now taking up the case mentioned above, where the average page size is 50kb, out of which 30Kb javascript and logo.

Cost Of Hosting

Now the most important part, the cost of hosting will be discussed. When you are going to host your website yourself on your own machine, it means an initial investment of around 800 U.S dollars needed to buy the machine and its accessories (modem, UPS, connecting cables). After this, you will have to pay the following bills monthly

The Electricity Bill
The ISP's bill which includes the bill of the static I.P also.
The software's license fees.
Apart from this the regular inspection, system crash, cost of inverter or generator or battery whatever you choose to back up the power supply.

These bills vary location to location. The part 3 can be deemed to be zero if you use shareware or freeware. Other bills should cost you at least 5 dollars a month. All this for just hosting your 100 odd pages!

When you go for a shared hosting, you can get a good host for five to ten dollars a month. Some cheap hosting plans might be cheaper than this also. But you should be careful while choosing a cheaper hosting plan and weigh the offer before going for it.

OK, so the hosting company takes care of all the above mentioned bills and gives you peace of mind. So much so that you can yell at your hosting company whenever you see something wrong with your services!

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the total bytes downloaded or uploaded from the web server. With self hosting you get as much bandwidth as your hardware or your Internet connection can support. Typically around 30GB (@128Kbps) a month (i.e. around 0.3 million page views a month)

Now let us calculate how much bandwidth your website will require. Let us suppose that initially your website will have 100 page views per day and it will grow to 1000 page (Highly optimistic though) views in three to six months before getting saturated for some time. This 1000 page views page per day will create a bandwidth of 1000*.15 Mb i.e 150Mb per day. Now multiply this by 30 and you get a bandwidth of 450Mb per month. So if you invest in 30GB/month bandwidth hosting paraphernalia, you will unwise of you.

Now you very much understand that you will not be getting 10000 page views from day one. It might take months and even years in some cases before you got that much traffic and this too will happen only if your tips are good enough to call the people visit you again and again.

Point is that you can start with basic hosting services which gives you a bandwidth of 100*300 i.e 3000*150 i.e . Once you start getting that much traffic, you can switch to any other plan fitting your needs at that time.

Another suggestion I would like to give here is that, whenever you have to make a choice between a disk space of 2 2GB/Month plan and 1GB, 4GB/Month plan, Go for the second one giving the maximum bandwidth.

Technical Support

There is no denial that once you start your own hosting you will be on your own (and on Google :) off course) to support your website. But with almost every hosting solution you might opt, the hosting service provider promises you to give "24*7" technical assistance. This makes shared hosting look attractive.

Accessibility : Ease of Use

With Self Hosting, you exactly know what you want, You can wath all the action live on your monitor. Off course this is what is the best.But, but, but if we think what would you be doing, we will come will learn that most of the time you will be making minor modifications, doing editing, writing a new tips which will be placed in the already decided, running weblayout! Nothing which requires you to be on your desktop.

Most of the hosting solution providers give you access to your folder, i.e the folder where you put all your web content. This access is usually complete in nature. You can do whatever you want inside this folder. You can create new folder, delete them, create new files, edit the existing ones whatever you can think of doing with them! To facilitate this, many hosting companies provides a web interface for you. C-Panel and Plex control panels are some of the most popular such web interfaces. If you do not about them, may be, they can provide you video tutorials to make you comfortable with the features of the interface.

Conclusion

Instead of writing the conclusion in a paragraph I will write them as points

• While deciding to buy or rent, stress to buy if the data you will be storing is extremely confidential. In all other conditions go for hosting companies.
• If this is your brand new website you want to publish on the net. Start with beginners hosting plan. Never go for personal hosting unless you have free spare resources.
• While looking for hosting solution providers, Give stress to the bandwidth and response time instead of the disk space. Unless the pictorial and video content of your website are the prime content.