Can Shared Hosting Handle Your Social Network?

The concept of social networking started out small but has grown immensely over the years. Today, people of all ages and races in various countries and professions are actively participating. In fact, research shows that the popular social networking site MySpace, has grown by an estimated 200-300% each year since its inception.

Why Social Networking?

Social networking sites offer numerous benefits to the webmaster and user community as well. Participating can gain exposure for all types of professionals including music artists, writers, models and many others. Although these communities are easy to join, not everyone has the skill to make an impact. Those blessed with the virtual gift of gab have the ability to progress their online identities and careers all without spending much, if any money. Facebook, a social networking phenomenon, is currently working on releasing numerous foreign language versions of its platform. When considering the ad revenue these sites bring in, the initial investment is peanuts in comparison to what you will see over the long run. Even if it is just a community forum, right now is definitely the best time to create your own social networking site and benefit from the global popularity.

The Demand of Social Networking

In order to build a social networking site, you need a web hosting company able to provide the support this type of platform requires. Keep in mind that these communities are much larger than the average website, and therefore more demanding in terms of bandwidth, RAM and other critical resources. For example, in the typical shared hosting arrangement, a community forum that sees an average of 3,000 visitors a day is really pushing the limits of what the server can handle. The same holds true for a social bookmarking site that has about 2,500 daily visitors. Once your community becomes this popular, you stand the risk of enduring performance issues with a site that runs incredibly slow. For this reason, upgrading to a more robust solution becomes a necessity.

What to Look For

When hunting for new service, you need to keep your eyes peeled for a solution that can be easily scaled as your community grows. This means you need a web hosting package that offers plenty of bandwidth so your users can upload photos, video and other content. Along with additional disk space and other critical resources, this type of service will deliver a stable platform that virtually eliminates downtime and allows your community to stay up and running. With the right hosting solution, your social networking site can run seamlessly regardless of the time and traffic levels you attract.

The Dedicated Solution

Shared hosting is cost effective but simply can’t provide the stability and reliability you need to run a demanding social networking site. Where this type of hosting fails, a dedicated server picks up the slack, providing scalable solutions with flexible bandwidth options to compensate for traffic spikes. We strongly recommend The Planet, eboundHost and LunarPages for your social networking needs. These companies have the technology and experience to help you build the ultimate community whether it’s a forum, social bookmarking site or large file sharing network.

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