When someone decides to start a blog or to simply create a family website it is very common for the person who is in charge of running the site to do some research about companies which provide a computer capable of serving web pages to visitors, most people don't need to use a lot of bandwidth or applications in order to do what they want to do so they end up signing up for a virtual or shared hosting deal.
Virtual hosting has become very popular because of its price, some may even start at $1.99 per month however, in this case you do get what you pay for, don't misunderstand this last phrase, price is no indication of the quality of a web host but considering the price it would be helpful for you not to have high expectations. Normal virtual hosting prices range from seven dollars all the way to $19 a month, this depends on the features that you will be using and the extras that you decide to sign up for, for most people the starter package will be just fine.
After you have started using a virtual server you will gain some information and knowledge about hosting a general, a virtual hosting account is basically an account which has been created on a web server which also hosts many other sites just like yours, this might not sound like something negative however, it can turn out to be just that. When you share a computer with several other websites you are basically sharing the same system resources so if the machine only has 1 GB of RAM if you install a script which uses 500 MB of RAM the other 50 sites which might be sharing the same environment will be affected because your site is already consuming half of the system resources.
Virtual accounts are normally advertise using phrases such as "unlimited bandwidth, high storage capacity, unlimited databases, etc.' however, all of these unlimited features are regulated by the amount of system resources your website will use, if the scripts that you are running start to affect the performance of the other sites which are hosted at the same environment your account may get deactivated or your site might go down taking the entire server with it. In a nutshell, this is the most common limitation that virtual hosting accounts have.
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