What is Shared Hosting

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Author: David J. Smith

For many organizations, businesses and people looking to hosting a web site the most often chosen form of hosting is "Shared Hosting". This type of hosting is very cost effective, and for many web sites this is the ideal hosting solution. Shared hosting has both advantages and disadvantages that you need to be aware of before making your decision.

Hosting providers offer shared hosting plans to customers that have web sites with low to moderate traffic levels. These plans are offered at a very low and reasonable monthly cost. Hosting providers can do this by allowing many customers to share hardware resources, maintenance and operational costs of single server. The customers accounts may be on the same physical server but the hard drive space is seperated so that no other users on the same server can access your data.

While shared hosting has many advantages, there are some disadvantages you should be aware of, shared hosting often means your sites are on the same server as hundreds or sometimes even thousands of other web sites. This sharing of resources means that your sites response time may be a little slow at times. For example, if your site is on the same server as several other high traffic web sites you may notice a little lag when accessing your site.

On the upside, a good shared hosting provider will monitor closely all sites on the server to make sure they are not using more than their fare share of resources, and if they are using too many resources and unacceptably slowing other sites on the server their sites will be moved to another server, or in some cases have their sites shutdown altogether, this may sound dramatic but it is a good thing for hosting providers to do this, it is better to have all the users on a server happy and remove the user abusing the resources, rather than having everyone on the server unhappy.

While shared hosting is not the best solution for everyone, for many it is the best option to consider when starting out, it allows customers to start small and manage costs, time and resources, while having access to the technical expertise of the web hosting provider all on a limited budget.

Article Written By David J. Smith, owner and operator of Webhost-Advisor.com