Setting up your own website can be a great way to express yourself, as well as earn some extra money. One of the major decisions when setting up your own website is to determine what type of host to use.

There are many options when it comes to choosing a web host, but for new webmasters, a shared hosting plan is often the most economical and easy way to get started.

Shared hosting is used to refer to web hosts that put multiple websites on each of their server. So, for example, on the same web server that hosts your site, there may also be fifty other websites.

The main advantage that shared hosting offers is that it is relatively inexpensive. Typically, most hosts charge less than $10 per month for their hosting plans.

Most hosts include one click installs of popular blogging platforms and other open source software, so it is possible to set up a Wordpress site or a phpbulliten site in only a few minutes, without ever having to touch the command line. Most hosts also offer free email accounts with each domain and will also let you host as many websites as you want on their server.

While shared hosting can be extremely affordable, since you are sharing a web server with many other websites, you are also sharing resources with all of these sites. If one of the sites has a runaway script or gets a great deal of traffic, it can bring your site down.

For very heavy traffic sites, shared hosting can also tend to be a little too slow, especially for e-commerce, where a slow loading web page could be the difference between a sale and the customer going elsewhere.

Many users start out using shared hosting and switch to a private server or a virtual private server after their website becomes established.

Shared hosting plans usually include "unlimited" bandwidth and "unlimited" storage, but it is important to take these boasts with a grain of salt. Most web hosts oversell their services, counting on the fact that most people won't actually take full advantage of them.

When a web host say unlimited, they do not really mean unlimited. Instead, it would be more accurate to say unlimited within reason. Most normal blogs and websites don't get that much traffic or take up that much space, so it is easy to say that they will offer unlimited bandwidth, because they use such a small amount.

However, in the case of extremely high traffic sites or file sharing sites, many hosts will cancel a users shared hosting plan and/or force them to switch to a private server.

There are many different web hosts that offer shared hosting, but I have had very good experiences with DreamHost. DreamHost offers a number of shared hosting plans, as well as private servers, at a very affordable rate. Their support staff is very responsive and any time I have had a problem, they have worked very hard to fix it.

DreamHost also offers a lot of nice extras and offers Linux Web Servers. They allow you to create "unlimited" email accounts, add "unlimited" shell accounts, make creating and managing Mysql Databases very easy, and also have a number of one-click-installs, which let you install many popular open source programs, like Wordpress, from your web browser.

It is also possible to save some money by using DreamHost Coupon Codes, which can get you things like a free IP address, which is great for SEO purposes or a free domain registration.

As an alternative to shared hosting, most web hosts also offer virtual private servers. A virtual private server is basically a regular web server, that has been divided into several groups. For all intensive purposes, each group thinks it is a web server and is invisible to the other virtual private servers.

Virtual Private Servers preform much better than shared hosting would and allows the user a lot more control over the machine. However, they also cost a great deal more. Instead of offering unlimited everything, the host has the user pay for the resources they use. Depending on how much traffic the site costs, this could cost $20 a month or $500 a month.

It is also possible to rent your own private server, which is actually a single server, with only your website on it.