Shared hosting at cheap prices: the evolution over the years

This article explains what is a cheap shared hosting provider. The hosting company divides a physical server into several “slots”, hosting more than one website at once. One hosting server is a hardware node that has several gigabytes of disk storage and many RAM memory. Each site has a disk space quota, with a specific web server configuration. The web server is shared, having several virtual hosts.  Each customer has access to a control panel, where it manages its email accounts, site configurations, databases, and other configurations.

One single server hardware can over 500 websites at the same time. Apache web server, the most popular HTTP server, is able to identify which domain the client requests. Then, it outputs the corresponding website according to its domain name. Even in a shared server, it’s possible to find the best web hosting services your company may require.

Cheap shared hosting companies will sell spaces in a professional hardware server. Copahost provides cheap web hosting services from €1,99 per month. We will make everything so that you can pay the lowest amount possible for cheapest web hosting per year, even for unlimited web hosting plans.

Cost evolution of the cheap shared hosting

The customers can use any PC as a web server and perform web hosting services. Professional hosting companies use Xeon CPU servers with more than 4 or 8 disks in RAID-10. Of course, there are cheap shared hosting servers as alternatives. In this article, we tested a dedicated server with MySQL and PHP in raspberry pi.

During the decade of 90, such plans used to cost over €50. The CPU’s were small, and a cheap shared hosting server of this time was able to host no more than 50 websites at once, on average. In 1998, Intel released its first Xeon processor. It was the Drake Pentium II Xeon. It had a huge improvement in the servers market, and a Xeon based server could then host somewhere near 100-150 websites. In 2006, Intel released the first Xeon Dual Core processor, the Xeon 5020. Since then, the server CPU’s are multiplying their code numbers.  In the decade of 2010, most of the CPU’s will have 4 cores or more. Some have 8, 12 and 16 cores, being able to host more than 2000 websites at once.

Performance

Today’s cheap shared hosting servers are way more powerful than dedicated servers on the ’90s. As per Moore’s law, every two years the CPU’s performance doubles. And this has been happening for decades. As a comparison, to have a certain performance with a shared hosting plan today, the customer can pay less than €2. Maybe in the year 2000, to have the same performance with a cheap dedicated server, you would have to spend more than €500.

What is shared hosting vs dedicated hosting?

With a dedicated hosting server, you will have one server exclusively for you, without sharing disks, memory and CPU with others. In a shared hosting plan, you will share resources with other customers. This last delivers less performance but costs much less.

Dedicated hosting requires you to configure and manage your server, firewalls, backups, etc. In a shared server environment, your hosting company does it all for you.

Shared hosting vs VPS

VPS Servers are a cheaper alternative rather than dedicated hosting. A VPS hosting server shares the resources of the server like the shared hosting, but you have root access to it. With root access, you can manage all the server roles, and you have your privacy guaranteed always.

Performance won’t be the same as a dedicated server but is usually much better than a cheap web hosting shared plan.

Free shared hosting: what happened to it?

In the past, Geocities and Tripod used to play an important role on the internet. Their free hosting services worked fine before WordPress hosting took place. A few years later, Hostinger used to provide such free plans. Both companies stopped providing such services, as it was unprofitable.

Nowadays, WordPress is responsible for up to 70% of the internet hosted websites. As it demands more processing, more space and a good storage speed for its database queries, free hosting companies didn’t attend such demand anymore.

Free web hosting companies gave place to cheap shared hosting companies. Copahost, for example, offers cheap hosting plans for as low as 1,99€ per month. It also provides free domain registration if you pay your hosting plan yearly.

Dreamhost and Bluehost cases

Dreamhost and Bluehost used to provide cheap shared hosting in the past. But a few years ago they realised that it was only worth to provide cheap services if it was paid several years in advance. If the customer placed a month-to-month payment, their prices will increase by up to 300%.

Copahost is the real alternative with cheap web hosting services, allowing customers to pay as they want (monthly, semi-yearly, etc..). “More flexibility with payments makes the customer happier, we believe” – Says Gustavo, Copahost CEO.

Cheap and unlimited web hosting? Does it exist?

A few years ago, many hosting companies used to promise unlimited space web hosting. Can both cheap and unlimited hosting services work together?

It depends. The term “unlimited” means unlimited disk space, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want in your hosting plan. Most of the ToS (terms of service) do limit activities you can perform and the kind of content you can host.

For example, Hostgator and Dreamhost don’t allow you to host backup files in such hosting spaces. Most of the hosting companies won’t allow you to host videos or big audio files. And also, there are processing limits on the server. The more inodes (files and directories) you have hosted, the more CPU usage your hosting plan will require. So whenever you plan to purchase an unlimited web hosting plan, you should check your company’s terms of service to check its conditions.

How to choose a cheap web hosting with WordPress

WordPress is now responsible for more than 70% of internet websites. It’s definitely the standard for CMS (Content Management System), and not only blogs. WordPress requires basically good database storage. In other words, a MySQL with an SSD storage and plenty of RAM is the best environment for it to run smoothly.

Of course, it’s possible to find a cheap web hosting company with WordPress support. The first thing you must consider is querying your hosting provider about its storage. If it runs with SSD, and if it includes a reasonable amount of RAM, then you are good to go.

Copahost servers have Xeons E5 series with 192GB (or more) of RAM memory and SSD storage options for MySQL databases.

Godaddy’s shared hosting

Godaddy started providing domain name registration services at cheap prices. They used to promise domains for less than $1 per year. Thus, after the renewals, the same domain would cost $50. And that made their customers very angry. As they started to lose customers, they adjusted their abolished their cheap domain registration prices.

Now they focus on hosting services, with a personal and custom made control panel. Their control panel is said by their customers to be poor and have a few features.

Conclusion: what’s the best web hosting for my site?

First, price isn’t everything. In most cases, the more expensive the hosting plan, the more performance you get. Finding the best web hosting plan is all about knowing the company and reading about it. The advantages of shared hosting are numerous. You can have a great service at a low price.

Copahost offers cheap shared hosting and cheap domain registrations as well. We offer the cheapest web hosting costs per year. Such paid hosting plans are unlike free web hosting companies, where the service quality is degraded. Even cheap, but a paid web hosting company will provide qualified support, better speed and much more safety. We are ready to help you growing and establishing your website!