subject: Best Options For Shared Hosting? [print this page] This is the most often used form of web hosting commonly available. In this set up, a company will possess one or more servers that they will set up to provide web hosting and their customers will pay them to have access to portions of the server which they share with other customers. Depending upon the size of the server, a single server account could host several hundred different websites at once.
Shared Hosting has many advantages. The high cost of buying and maintaining a server can be balanced against the income from multiple clients paying to use it, making it the least expensive form of commercial hosting. The is ideal for anyone with no high-level technical skills but who has a web site in need of hosting since your sole responsibility is monitoring your own account. Most shared hosting accounts give customers a contract, guaranteed "up" times and customer support, among many other feature options and extras.
The drawback, of course, as the "host sharing" name implies, other clients are sharing the server with you. The server, just like a home PC, has only so much memory, CPU and disk space available, and if other customers are using it heavily - or if the Web Host has put too many people on the server - or even if the server isn't particularly fast in the first place! The speed of the server itself is a factor in this scenario as well.
Additionally, many dramatic and useful high-end features available to you will not be functional because of shared hosting. There is also the ever present security risk which is slightly elevated when you share a server with other clients but this is negligible since the server itself will be secure to begin with.
Most web sites and users find shared hosting to be an model answer to theri hosting needs. The only people that will not find many advantages from using this form of service are those that want lots of control over their own server and its contents.
