Shared hosting plans are incredibly convenient. The full-service approach to hosting makes it easy for business owners to remove themselves from the behind-the-scenes work of keeping a website online. There can, however, be some drawbacks to these hosting plans. To make sure you’re really getting the most from your shared hosting package, it’s important to regularly ask these 3 questions.

Nothing can ruin a great afternoon like a blasted 404 error page. We’ve all been there – surfing the web like there’s no tomorrow, when BAM! All progress comes to a screeching halt because we land on a page that reads “404 Error: Page not found!”

How frustrating!

And then the questions start to rise. For instance, why is it called a “404” page? And are there any other sorts of pages out there we need to be watching out for? To better understand these pages, which are flagged by server response codes, we have to first understand how the web works. Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple.

A server is technically a piece of software that is capable of accepting requests and responding accordingly. Many people know a server to be the computer that the server software is actually running on. Throughout this article, we’ll be referring to the software – not the computer itself.