What Is Shared Hosting: Pros And Cons Of Shared Hosting Explained

What Is Shared Hosting: Before choosing the right web hosting service and plan for your self-hosted blog/website, it is important that you understand the different types of web hosting. This is crucial because your web hosting plan should meet the requirements and goal of your website. Beginners, especially, are confused about which one is suitable for their website. Basically, web hosting can be of five types:

1. Shared Hosting,
2. Dedicated Hosting,
3. VPS Hosting
4. Reseller Hosting,
5. Cloud Hosting,

In this article, I will cover what is Shared Hosting and what are the advantages and disadvantages of Shared Hosting. Read on.

Find Out How To Choose The Right Web Hosting Service Here

What Is Shared Hosting?

Before getting into what is Shared Hosting, let us first understand what web hosting means.

For your website to exist on the Internet, all your content, various files, and software need to be stored somewhere. This is where hosting services come to the rescue as it would be highly expensive for individuals to own and manage the storage facilities and technologies necessary to host websites.

Now, in Shared Hosting, a single server is shared by a number of websites. This means the resources of the server are distributed among a number of websites. By resources, I mean:

• Disk space,
• Bandwidth,
• Database,
• FTP Accounts,
• Processor, etc.

You will have no idea with whom you are sharing the server and its resources. Also, there is not any fixed number of websites that will be hosted on the same server.

Advantages Of Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting offers various advantages which are as under:

1. Because the server and its resources are shared by many websites, Shared Hosting plans are cheap and economical compared to other types of hosting. In fact, they are extremely affordable and is, thus, suitable for websites with a small budget.
2. Shared hosting is the perfect choice for beginners and small start-ups. As there won’t be much traffic to these sites, Shared Hosting will be able to sustain it.
3. Later, when the traffic increases, you can upgrade your plan to some other type of hosting. This is possible with most of the web hosting services.
4. You don’t have to worry about the maintenance of the server or any other associated technical issue. The service provider will take care of all these things.
5. You don’t need any kind of technical knowledge related to hosting.
6. Most of the Shared Hosting plans come with cPanel to control and manage your website, which makes it extremely easy for webmasters to run the website. You get a lot of control over customization without having any high level of technical knowledge.
7. The technology has evolved a lot and most of the Shared Hosting plans today guarantees more than 99 percent uptime.
8. With most of the web hosting service providers, you can have many email accounts.
9. With Shared Hosting, you will get MySQL and PHP support.

Disadvantages Of Shared Hosting

There are some disadvantages of Shared Hosting as well. These are as under:

1. One of the major problems that arise due to the sharing of resources of a single server by many websites is that your website may slow down due to overloading of the server. The website load time being a ranking factor, this may affect rankings.
2. Websites on Shared Hosting are vulnerable to hacking and other security issues.
3. Customer support of Shared Hosting plans may not be up to the mark compared to dedicated hosting.
4. As the resources are being shared, there are chances of facing issues in terms of overall performance of the website. If the server itself stops working, it could be disastrous.
5. There will be a limitation in terms of the software and application you can use. Apart from the ones that come with the plan, you cannot install any other software.

So, considering the pros and cons of Shared Hosting, it is recommended for a new website or small start-ups to go for Shared Hosting at the initial stage. They can sustain even up to 50,000 monthly visitors. Traffic of this sort will take time to generate. No point in spending too much money until then.

Later on, based on your requirement and budget you can move on to some other type of hosting.

I hope I have been able to explain what is Shared Hosting and its advantages and disadvantages. If you have any query regarding this article on what is Shared Hosting, feel free to ask your question below and I will respond at the earliest.