Understanding Shared Hosting

The reason of a lower cost is that the resources of a single server (disk space, physical memory, processor time) are shared between multiple websites.

Shared hosting advantages

Compared to other possible alternatives (i.e. dedicated servers), shared hosting is not only cheaper but even much easier to manage especially for not technically oriented people.

In fact all the operations concerning the server maintenance are performed by the hosting company and you don't need to worry about complicated stuff like installing and updating the operating system or any other application on the server.

All you need to run your website is pre-installed and already configured.

Shared hosting disadvantages

Due to the nature of a shared hosting environment the performances of a single website can be negatively affected by any other website on the same server.

Even if only a single site experiences a sudden huge increase in traffic or runs a too resource-intensive script the resources available for all the other sites on the same server can be reduced to a point that they become extremely slow or stop working at all.

Although this incovenience cannot be underestimated, it's also true that reputable web hosting companies constantly monitor their servers performances and can quickly deal with a situation like this by temporarily shutting down or moving to another server the website that is abusing the server resources.

Another disadvantage is that the possibilities to customize your website are somewhat limited. A shared hosting account is provided 'as is'. Web hosting companies usually provide their clients with all the 'standard stuff' to run a website: support for scripting languages, databases and often many pre-installed applications.

But it may happen that a web application or script you want to utilize on your site requires a particular feature or add-on that is not present on the server. In this case it can be problematic or even impossible to convince your host to install something on a shared server for the benefit of a single customer.

A reputable host is all that matters

Shared hosting is perfectly adequate even for a busy website with thousands of daily visitors.

However you must pay attention to choose a reputable web hosting company that employ a competent staff.

• They must monitor the resource usage and avoid to overload their servers with too many websites.
  
  
• They must quickly detect and solve any problem related to abuses of shared resources minimizing the server downtime.