Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a subset of web hosting. Shared refers to the sharing of resources, namely the disks or file volumes, RAM, CPU, and other resources amongst multiple (often many) websites. From a consumer's standpoint, shared hosting is the least expensive foray into the world of managed hosting.

Shared hosting is often aimed at beginners and intermediate users. But something often overlooked is that even for advanced users, this can be the best solution if you don't need shell access, scripting or database access, or logs and permissions control.

As the name implies, Shared hosting is "sharing" the hosting enviroment. Usually your web site lives in a folder along side many other folks web sites, and the same web server process serves up all of the those sites on request. This means any site in a shared enviroment that acts as a bandwidth hog will take CPU and disk access time away from other neighboring sites in the enviroment. Many shared hosting providers work to mitigate these circumstances by controlling the bandwidth, file sizes and overall resource usage available to any one site. Upgrades in a shared hosting enviroment generally consist of making additional bandwidth, file size and CGI access available... basically allowing you to take up a higher priority among your neighbors. All in all this is a very good balance of cost versus performance.

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