Is there a difference in shared hosting plans?

Reliable hosting providers

With shared hosts, what differentiates them is their response and customer service attitude when problems occur.

A reliable hosting provider is a gold mine in and of itself. All providers will have downtime at some point or another; what makes them reliable is their response and customer service attitude when that downtime does occur.

To check on the reliability of hosting providers, do some research. Check any help forums that the provider might have and see how many complaints there are, and what is done to resolve them. If the provider lists any companies that it hosts, send those companies an email asking them how they like the hosting from that provider. Do some research before signing up, and you’ll be much better off.

Most of the time there is little difference between shared hosting plans. Server hardware is generally fast enough that it can provide consistent service and power to each website, regardless of the user.

Software features are generally standard, and though they may differ slightly from host to host, they will not generally differ much across similarly priced plans. The time when differences in plans really comes into play is in dedicated hosting plans, not shared hosting plans.

Some of the standard software that is typically included in a shared hosting plan is support for FTP access, mySQL, and Microsoft Frontpage extensions. Standard features for shared hosting plans includes a moderate monthly bandwidth limit (i.e., 100GB/month), a modest amount of email addresses (i.e., 20-30), and a moderate amount of storage space on the server (i.e., 5-10GB).