When you are looking for web hosting all the lead-in prices you see are for a shared web hosting service.

Website hosting companies usually offer more advanced services such as VPS and dedicated server hosting but these cost considerably more and for anyone just starting out a shared web hosting service is perfectly fine.

A shared web hosting service simply means that multiple customers are hosted on a server and share the resources of that server. Some hosting companies specify a limit for usage of resources such as bandwidth and disk space and others offer “unlimited” resources.

 

“Unlimited” is basically a marketing term which is better read as “reasonable”. If your site is successful and starts taking too many resources then your host will not be happy. An unlimited shared web hosting service, which avoids setting arbitrary limits can benefit both parties. It makes the package much simpler and allows users to get through peaks without hitting pre-set limits. However there are always limits even if they are not well defined. For example the terms and conditions of oneshared web hosting service state “…. service is designed to meet the typical needs of small business and home business website subscribers. It is not intended to support the sustained demand of large enterprises, internationally based businesses, or non-typical applications better suited to a dedicated server”. Companies can sell this sort of package because they know that most users will only use a fraction of the resources available.
 

As a general guideline you should be able to run a site getting up to 10,000 visitors a day on shared web hosting service (but if you are running a database driven site, like WordPress, you will have to be caching the site efficiently).

 

Of course each shared web hosting service is different. Companies vary as to how many users they host on a server. This can affect the performance users see. Website hosting companies also need to monitor their shared servers closely and ensure that no user abuses their position and adversely affects the other users.  

 

There are many factors to consider when choosing a shared web hosting service, which are considered in other articles but I would strongly advise making good support the primary factor.