Pros and cons of shared web hosting
Whilst surfing around some web hosting websites you might have come across the term “shared web hosting” or “shared hosting”. Well, you can probably guess from the name, it means that the server you rent from your provider is shared with other customers. It’s as easy as that.
The advantage of shared web hosting is the costs. Because your provider doesn’t have to dedicate a whole server to you, he can reserve just a part if it – whatever your webspace limit is – and is not responsible for maintaining one server per customer. The disk space of the server can be used to capacity in comparison to one server per customer, where you probably just use a part of it.
For the customers a shared server is also convenient because you don’t need expertise in server management and so on, your web hosting company takes care of it and most of the time you have a good support included.
Of course there is no advantage without a disadvantage: one big minus could be the security aspect. Because there are multiple domains on one server it may be possible to hack into files from other domains. If you have doubts concerning this matter, get some information from your web host.
Another thing is the limited webspace, because you have to share it with others, you are restricted in some way, but in most cases you can upgrade your package if you need some more space. Also the performance might suffer from the traffic of your neighbours.
The counterpart of a shared web hosting service is the dedicated web hosting service. If you need some further reading on that, feel free to check our post on this topic: Pros and cons of dedicated web hosting.