In terms of popularity, shared hosting commands the highest popularity among WordPress website owners. The sheer popularity of shared hosting completely shadows the truth behind some of the most commonly used cliches such as ‘unlimited shred hosting plans’ ‘easy and affordable shared hosting solutions’ and so forth.

One should always read between the lines, especially when it is concerned with the vital decision of choosing a hosting plan for your WordPress website.

Shared hosting- a critical perspective

It is not very difficult to understand the meaning of shared hosting. Well, a ‘shared hosting’ is a shared hosting. It is as simple as that. But is it really so straightforward? Not at all! Hosting service providers make huge profits by offering shared hosting plans to individual users who think that they have got the best deal for their money.

This can complicate things further. If a user is paying almost 1/10th of what he or she would be paying for a dedicated server hosting, then where is the catch? There is not just one catch. In fact, there are many! How many times you have come across claims about unlimited resources including bandwidth, disk space, or domains?

The answer itself could be ‘unlimited times’! Have you ever given it a thought that is it practically possible to offer any resource as unlimited to customers? Let us imagine, just for the sake of an argument that every tenant of shared hosting starts using the resources to the fullest, then shared hosting would come to a grinding halt. This is the practical side of shared hosting.

Every user is allocated certain amount of resources and all resources are shared among number of users in a shared hosting environment. This means that you can never expect to get ‘unlimited bandwidth’ and so many other resources, especially if you are having a shared hosting account. The resources are excruciatingly limited and are more than sufficient for smaller websites with meager amount of traffic.

If you are a beginner and do not expect a moderate growth in the popularity of your website, then shared hosting is the most appropriate option for you. Shared hosting is undoubtedly the most economical choice in comparison with VPS or dedicated hosting. It is not suitable for resource intensive sites that need to handle heavy traffic of visitors.

Web hosting services have their own ways to handle users who are over-utilizing their allocated resources in shared hosting. You can come across hosts that will peacefully suspend your account without showing a simple courtesy of informing you about it. Some may notify you by email, but only after they have suspended your account. Such issues can be very frustrating.

One of the biggest issues with shared hosting service providers is that of overselling. These hosts go on cramming websites to exploit the server resources without giving a damn to the plight of tenants. It is like staying in a cheap settlement that is crammed by inmates.

So, the million dollar question is how to select the right shared WordPress hosting provider. And the simple answer is to look for reputed providers without getting bogged down by the inflated list of features and offerings that could be of hardly any use to you.

Majority of shared hosting providers offer identical features and fill use a sales talk that is sprinkled with useless jargon that is hardly decipherable by common individuals. Hence it is prudent to give more importance to industry reputation.

Merits and demerits of shared WordPress Hosting

The most prominent advantage of Shared WordPress hosting is the cost. It is much more affordable than dedicated WordPress hosting. Thanks to technological advances, majority of providers offer control panel for ease of administration including Fantastico, cPanel and so forth. The robust technical support and performance monitoring support helps user concentrate on their key responsibilities and functions more efficiently.

On the demerits side, Shared WordPress Hosting can be found to be slower than dedicated WordPress hosting. The element of overselling can lead to resource crunch leading to frequent downtime issues. Users are advised to check for such events with other website owners to rule out the possibility.

It must be noted that WordPress is an extremely lightweight solution and is not highly resource intensive. Hence it is commonly used in a shared hosting environment. In fact, many reputed shared hosting providers have excelled in offering WordPress optimized shared hosting plans.