The Web hosting company you choose has a lot to do with how many visitors you plan on “serving” (pun intended) and whether or not you have robust functionality on your website.

For example if you are an informational website and you do not have a shopping cart, your hosting needs should be met with a hosting starter package on a shared server. With hosting, you can either share a server with many other websites (200 or 2,000 websites) or you can have a server all to yourself. There are in-between servers where you can share a server with about 5 other websites.

Shared Server: Think of a shared server as a hotel that keeps different websites in each of the rooms in the hotel. One server can take as many websites as the hosting company wants to crowd in there.

The thing to keep in mind when you are sharing a website with 2,000 other websites is that if one website gets a huge amount of visitors at one time, the server can’t handle it and crashes. All 2000 websites go down.

You are probably never going to know that the reason your website crashed is because the hosting company crowded too many websites onto one server.  It is unlikely they will tell you.

Therefore, if you can afford it, try to at least have the semi- shared server situation where you are sharing a server with maybe 5 other websites.

Dedicated servers: These are the best and of course most expensive servers. You will see an increase of companies and households purchasing these servers for their websites. Currently the rental prices for a dedicated server are about $400 to $600 per month.

Dedicated servers allow you to have a server all to yourself and they have plenty of bandwidth. Many times companies start with shared hosting. As their online business grows, they move into the dedicated servers.

Choose a hosting company that has a good reputation, is up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 99.9 % of the time. Try to get a hosting company that provides support 24 hours a day.