Home>>Web Hosting Information>>What Is Shared Hosting?

Web hosting is the storage of a website and the delivery of its web pages to the Internet. With shared hosting, also known as virtual hosting, the web host houses the files for several websites on the same server. This allows your website to maintain a strong connection to the Internet without the cost of running your own server.

The web hosting company allows to each website a certain amount of disk storage space and a fixed bandwidth (data transfer capacity), usually for a monthly fee.

The primary advantage of shared hosting is that it is much less expensive than dedicated hosting, in which a single server is dedicated entirely to one website. Another advantage is that it's easy - by "outsourcing" your website, you don't need to have a technical staff to run it on your own. And a professional web hosting company usually offers reliability - your web host should guarantee that your website can be accessed anytime, and should have multiple systems to ensure constant connection to the Internet.

Shared hosting is usually a good option for individuals and small to midsized companies. It gives your website a strong connection to the Internet at a relatively low price, and you can also take advantage of the technical support of your web hosting company.

By trusting your website to your web hosting company, you'll have to give up some administrative control of your site to the web host. If you're not too technically savvy, this isn't a problem, but if you're a techie who loves to be hands-on, this could prove frustrating. In addition, because the server hosts several sites at once, a technical problem with one site could adversely affect others on the same server.

Therefore, if you have a very active website that would take up most of a server's resources, shared hosting is probably not the best choice for you. Similarly, if you have an extremely busy e-commerce trade and can't take the chance that another website's technical difficulties could interfere with your sales, dedicated hosting is a better option.