Web hosting is a kind of Internet hosting service by which a person or company can make their websites accessible via the World Wide Wed. The popular options for hosting a website are shared server, virtual private server and dedicated server. Among those options, shared web hosting is the most popular and affordable one. If you are looking for a suitable web hosting service for blogs, personal websites, photo galleries, communities, small business websites, shared web hosting can be a good option for you.

What is Shared Web Hosting?

Shared web hosting means that multiple users share the same server resources with each other, like storage, bandwidth, CPU and RAM. Among the different types of web hosting, shared hosting is the most widely used by webmasters. It can suit the majority of both business and personal needs. Because of the common use, shared web hosting is simply called web hosting or website hosting by many hosting companies.

Shared web hosting is available on two platforms: Linux web hosting and Windows web hosting. Linux web hosting service is popular for the affordable price, rich scripts like PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl and Python. While Windows web hosting is widely used to run classic Asp or .NET scripts, but the charge is higher than Linux web hosting.

On the shared web hosting platform, the services as disk space, monthly traffic, email accounts, FTP accounts, databases etc are limited for each user. In addition, all performance resources on the server are shared, including the RAM and CPU, the single Apache server, the single MySQL server and the single Mail server.

Shared web hosting provider is responsible for server maintenance, including both hardware and software. Provider upgrades CPU, add memory, replace hard disk, setup backup system, network routing and internet connection. And they also guarantee to upgrade operating system, hosting solution software, install security path, manage firewall etc. Most shared web hosts provide first-rate technical support, which allow customers contact their support team via various communication channels to solve problems promptly.

Who Suits for Shared Web Hosting?

Shared web hosting is applicable to private or small business but not to enterprise and high traffic websites. Therefore, shared web hosting can be a good choice, if you are starting the Internet business and the website traffic is less than 800 page views or 300 visits daily.

Advantages for Shared Web Hosting

Web hosting providers offer various packages for customers to win a larger market share, which are affordable and rich-featured. The advantages of shared web hosting are as follow:

• Affordable Price – effective cost per month, sharing with other customers means you don’t need to pay for the whole server in advance. If paid annually, many discounts are available. For example, bisend.com offers 64% discount for customers pay for the 3 yaers subscription.
• Rich Features – most shared hosts offer various add-on programs and tools that help you optimize your site and make it efficient and dynamic.
• Control Panel – all shared web hosting providers offer their services with a user-friendly control pane, such as cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, vDeck and much more, which help you upload your site, create email accounts and a database easily.
• Easy to Administer – the hosting providers handle all of the complicated configuration, set-up and maintenance, so you just need to add domains, set up email accounts with their simple control panel.

Disadvantages

Shared web hosting can meet the requirements of most people, but it has disadvantages which include:

• Limited Resources – every user have restrictions on their services, for that they need to share system resources with other users on one physical machine.
• Restricted Installation – users are not allowed to install modules and programs on the server to run your own website, because provider needs to satisfy the average clients' needs.
• Security – if one user installs an insecure script, the others can be influenced by the risk factors.
• Reliability – if one user takes up all the bandwidth or causes the server malfunction, all the other users can be affected.
• On the basis of the description above, shared web hosting is the most affordable way to host a website and popular with most webmasters. If you plan to create a small website and look for an excellent and effective-cost web hosting service, shared web hosting is a good option for you.