Shared hosting stands for renting a section of a single physical server from a web hosting provider. Websites can store their files and applications while sharing the server’s resources with other website owners. Consequently, every webpage hosting their site in that server shares the maintaining costs with the rest of the sites.

Shared hosting allows websites to access all the features the web hosting company has to offer. However, large websites often need dedicated servers.

NameCheap, a popular web hosting provider, provides valuable insight into shared hosting.

How does shared hosting work?

Typically, a single server hosts just one blog or website. But with shared servers, hundreds or even thousands of sites and blogs store their applications and files on a particular, separated partition of the same web server.

Web pages agree to share the web server’s resources with all the other websites hosted on that shared machine. However, the web hosting platform ensures any personal data is kept confidential from the other webmasters.

Pros and cons

The emerging solution for plenty of starting websites it’s been sharing a web server. Above all, due to financial limitations. However, shared hosting plans are not perfect.

Advantages

• Cost-effective. A short budget hinders hundreds of new websites and blogs from starting their online venture. Fortunately, shared hosting plans are up to 10 times less expensive than dedicated servers.
• Escalability. If things go the right way, websites can upgrade to premium plans without hassle.
• Low maintenance. Web hosting providers take care of plenty of administrative tasks for you. That includes software updates or malware prevention.
  

Disadvantages

• Regulated traffic. Shared hosting plans only allow so much traffic to a webpage. Therefore, large websites must inevitably opt for premium plans.
• Slower loading speed. When sharing a server, sites might experience performance issues. This problem could lead to users leaving the website or poor rankings in search engines.
• Finite disk space. Websites sharing a server don’t have much disk space available for storing images or video files.
  

Shared hosting is the perfect starting point for new blogs and personal websites. It comes with limitations, that’s for sure. However, these limitations often don’t harm a website’s daily operations.