I had been having some issues recently with some of the new sites that I was working on. Problem is when the site is really new, it doesn’t makes sense getting a 400 dollar dedicated server for it. Therefore I do keep it shared with others. This way the costs comes down and it gets time to evolve and grow. After the growth period is over it can be shifted onto its own server. Till then the shared servers are the best choice for those type of projects.

Most of the times this kind of setup is also beneficial for developers who want to test the waters before going full fledged after the project. While on shared server you don’t get flexibility to do core changes as some of the features are blocked, but you do get enough things to play with. If you are a newbie then it also provides you with a learning platform to get familiar with the control panel and other settings in it. One more benefit of using a shared server is that you do get good support from the hosting provider. Not trying to say that you don’t get the support on dedicated servers but on a dedicated servers the ball is always in your court as you are responsible for setting many things up on a dedicated one.

Nowadays shared server packages are good enough and does includes good amount of disk space as well as allocated bandwidth. Most of the times, it is more than enough and you will never run out of the allocated bandwidth or the disk space.

If you have multiple sites then you can go with multiple domain web hosting. This are more or less similar to shared servers the difference is the hosting package that you would get. Some do allow 100 domains with 100 MySQL databases and 100 email accounts. While some have, unlimited amount of domains, subdomain, addon domains and email accounts. Just choose wisely, as just getting lots and lots of bandwidth is of no use if you cannot host more than one domain on that particular account. While on other hand hosting unlimited domains on an account with limited disk space and bandwidth is also of no use. Also make sure that the server’s uptime and testimonials from their customers are good enough.

You can search the internet in order to do your research. You can read good and bad reviews about a particular host and how their customer support is and how their servers perform. Payment option is also a deciding factor when you are choosing a good web host. Check out what payment gateways they support. I know that choosing the right kind of server can be headache but if you are new in this things than you can ask your developer about what are the minimum requirements that a server should have for a particular project. If you are planning to run small to medium sized sites then I don’t think that shared or multi domain hosting would give any problems.