Virtual hosting packages are the most common on the Internet and offer a professional and well-established look for personal and small business web sites. You will find more than one type of hosting and a successful website depends on good host. Most web hosting companies offer a choice between virtual shared hosting. With a virtual host, many websites are sharing a single machine with a single IP address.

With Virtual Hosting, you are sharing the physical server and you are also sharing a single set of software applications, which is configured and controlled by the server’s administrators – not you. The virtual hosting, a developer can secure space on a server and have shared access to the server's features. Hosting companies provide this service by maintaining a large server and on that large server they maintain a number of virtual web hosts.

Virtual hosting has its own benefits and risks. Regarding benefits, the most obvious benefit of a virtual hosting account is price: it is low.  You can pay anywhere between $2.00 and $20.00 per month for shared hosting, depending upon the features of the host.  If you are just starting a website or don’t get a lot of traffic, or are concerned with price, then you’ll probably start with virtual hosting.

Regarding risks of virtual hosting, one of the disadvantages of having your website hosted on a shared server is going to be server response time, or server load.  A server receives requests for files and serves up those files in the order the requests are received. It's like waiting on hold with your computer customer support company: if you're second in the queue, then you get served pretty quickly; but if you're the 20th customer on hold in the queue, you'll have to wait a lot longer.

Ultimately, it isn’t necessarily due to the number of sites on a server, your site will response slow. It will also depend upon those sites’ traffic hosted on same server. Response time may be slower if you share a server with 50 busy sites than if you share a server with 100 sites that only get a few hits per day.  Hence, it is always preferable to ask the web host how many sites they allow on a shared server, and what the maximum traffic and transfer allowed for each site.

(Posted By Nancy on Tuesday, May 16, 2006)