Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting and will suit the majority of both small business and personal needs. As the word implies, shared web hostingmeans that you are sharing one server (CPU time, memory, OS, applications, etc) with some other clients of your hosting server providers, and the service provider will take the responsibility to ensure uptime, security and functionality.
Advantage
- Low Cost. As you share the resource with the other account, the price could be much lower than the other hosting type.
- Ease to Use. You have no need to be skilled in server management when using a shared hosting. Normally your web host will offer a free control panel (such as cPanel, Plesk, etc),with which you could easily manage email, file, database, installing Blog and more.
- Better customer support. As shared hosting is the most profitable and competitive hosting product, and web host str responsible for server maintenance, most of shared hosting service provider will strive to offer better support to their customers to build reputation in the industry.
Disadvantage
- Server Restriction. In shared hosting, normally you are not allowed to install new software or change the server level setting. Some of web host might also disable the shell access to the server (you cannot telnet to the server, but could ftp file). So, before purchasing, you need to make sure the web hosts offer the features are required by your web site, which might include script support, database, and some web server setting (for example, Apache URL Rewrite module, etc).
- Resource Constraints. Most of shared hosting will limit the consumption of CPU or Memory resource, so when your site exceed the threshold they have configured, your account might be suspended.
- Security Risk. As you share the server with the other accounts, there might be some security risk if your web hosts haven’t setup the environment properly.
When You Should Consider Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is perfect for personal site, blog, small business site or development environment. But in below case, we don’t recommend shared hosting
- Your site need a memory higher than 128MB
- Daily traffic over 1000 page view, or Daily Unique IP visit is 300+
- Need to customize the server environment and install something shared hosting don’t support normally.
- Your site contain business critical data and need the site to be highly secured.
In above case, you should go with VPS, Cloud or Dedicated Server in which you get more control on the server, but in the other hand, those are much more expensive and you need to be more skilled to maintain the servers.