There are two basic different types of hosting available. Shared space servers, and dedicated servers. By far the most common are shared space servers. What this means is that the large hosting computer, known as a server, is used to provide hosting to many customers, and so your data is stored on a disc drive which is shared by all the customers on the server.
Obviously, for the web hosting company, it saves them money if they put more customers on each server. The more per server, the less the cost per customer!
It's a good idea to try and find out how many customers per server the hosting company you are looking at allocates, and do some comparisons between companies. The more customers per server, potentially the slower your sites hosting may be, although of course there are other factors.
Another trap for young players is "reseller" accounts that claim to offer multiple IP addresses. A reseller account can be a good idea if you are intending to host more than one site, but this is beyond the scope of this article to discuss. Often webmasters want to host their different sites on different IP addresses. (An IP address is the digital address of your server, such as 235.322.19.10).
If you want to do this so you can link from one site to another in order to get a Search Engine Optimization benefit, it's important to realize that the different IP addresses need to have different "C Class" IP addresses. C Class refers to the third set of numbers. Usually these are all the same on a given server, and in such cases you will get little SEO benefit from interlinking between sites.
So be careful before you get excited about a web hosting company claiming to offer multiple IP addresses.
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