What has shared hosting and how to choose it?
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is a type of website hosting in which several websites are hosted on the same physical server. This helps to significantly reduce hosting costs.
Each of the users gets a part of the server on which they can place their website files. On such a server, hundreds of users can be hosted.
Each customer using shared hosting has access to features such as databases, monthly traffic, disk space, e-mail accounts, FTP accounts, and other add-ons offered by the hosting company.
System resources are distributed evenly among the server users, with each getting its own share of RAM, CPU, and other items such as MySQL, Apache, and the mail server.
Virtual hosting offers the most cost-effective way to have a website online, as the server maintenance costs are shared among all users. This type of hosting is best suited for small websites or blogs that do not require additional configuration or high bandwidth.
Since shared hosting is not sufficient for websites with high traffic, these websites should use VPS hosting or even a fully dedicated server.
Let’s make an analogy
Virtual hosting is like using public transportation. Traveling by bus is an alternative to driving your own car. This approach has its own advantages: it is more environmentally friendly and, in many cases, it is cheaper. But if you have traveled by bus during rush hour, you will have noticed that it sometimes gets crowded. And the time per trip on the bus is, on average, longer than when using a private vehicle.
This is how shared hosting works. Server resources are shared with other users, but you can still use a lot of resources.
Virtual hosting is a basic service that can provide the number of resources needed for a beginner webmaster, or for sites that will not have a lot of traffic, such as a local school website. Most beginning webmasters choose shared hosting.
It is popular for two main reasons
It is the cheapest option: Since many people share server resources, the costs for individual users remain low.
Ease of use: Although VPS can compete in price with shared hosting in many cases, in terms of convenience for beginners, there is nothing easier than shared hosting. Unless there are out-of-the-box website builders, but that’s a separate issue.
Most shared hosting offers come with easy-to-use features, such as an easy-to-use control panel that allows you to upload files for your website, create an email account and add databases.
How does shared hosting work?
As I said, shared hosting is when several websites are hosted on the same server. The numbers can vary from a few hundred to several thousand, depending on the available hard disk space, RAM, and CPU power.
This type of hosting is done on a machine identical to a dedicated server, but its resources are used by a much larger number of clients. The files for each website user account and any applications are stored in separate partitions on the server, and each hosting client has its own file directory tree. Users do not have access to the root directory, or to each other’s files. All shared server accounts share the computing resources of the web server.
