When the time to start a personal or a business website comes, one of the first things you should consider is a good and reliable hosting company that would keep your websites online 24/7. Finding the optimal solution at a good price is a key point to your success on the web, so unless you want to run a large corporate website that would require a lot of resources, you should consider buying a shared hosting plan.
Shared hosting means that a number of people have hosting accounts on the same server, so the costs are being shared between the hosting account holders depending on how many resources each of them is using. The more the resources are, the higher the price will be. If more people share the same machine, it means that the price each of them will pay will be much lower compared to a dedicated server solution, for example.
On a shared hosting server, you will have your own account and none of the other people on the server will have access to it. You will have guaranteed resources such as disk space, monthly traffic, database space and so on, so you can develop and maintain a number of websites in that account and know that they will have the necessary resources to run properly. It would be an advantage if your hosting provider is offering different shared hosting plans so that you can switch between them with ease in case you need to move to a higher plan, or if you want to upgrade a particular feature while keeping your current plan. Such flexibility makes the shared plans a preferred web hosting choice compared to dedicated solutions where an upgrade would mean adding or replacing hardware, and this means downtime for your websites and emails.
The shared web hosting plans usually have a CPU load limitation. The load is created when people visit your website and the server handles the requests from their browsers, executes the scripts on the website, sends a response to those people's browsers, etc. Heavy, unoptimized scripts or a large number of people visiting your website simultaneously will increase the CPU load significantly, so a shared hosting plan may not be suitable for websites like social networks or video portals where many thousands of people may come online at the same time. In this case, you may consider a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a dedicated server, which would give you much more system resources and would ensure the flawless work of such heavy websites.
If you run a personal or a small or medium-sized corporate website, then a shared web hosting plan would be the better choice. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, a Moodle educational website with a few hundred students, or maybe an e-commerce website, a shared plan would give you enough resources to run such a website at a minimal cost. You can see a wide variety of hosting plans on websites like NTCHosting.com, for example, where you can easily upgrade from one plan to another if you see that you need more system resources, or you can instead upgrade just a single feature like the CPU quota or the number of databases. Hosting your personal blog on a dedicated server, for example, would be a waste of money, unless you expect thousands of visitors all the time. Even if you have a number of websites, you can still host them in a single shared hosting account as long as you fit in the system resource allocation settings that the particular plan is offering you, so a shared hosting account is the optimal solution to start your web presence.