How Does Shared Hosting Work? Shared Hosting FAQs.

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How does Shared Hosting work?

Shared hosting is when multiple websites are hosted on one single physical server. The servers resources like hard disk space, CPU, and memory are all shared among the websites hosted on it.

The costs are also split between all the users on that server. In fact, the more websites on a shared server, the higher the profit margin is for the Web Host. Most users have no idea who or how many websites they are sharing their server with.

Actually, many shared servers often have hundreds of websites sharing one single server. This is how Shared Hosting works.

The sharing of this physical server and its resources is why shared hosting is usually the cheapest hosting plan available.

A web hosting provider essentially offers disc space on one server to many different webmasters to store their website’s files, including their CMS, themes, plugins as well as any content and media etc.

These websites are then made live on the internet via these shared servers.

Actually, many Web Hosts also have what’s called a Reseller program. A Reseller program allows “Resellers” to sell their own Shared Hosting plans, which is an amount of disc space on a single server to their own clients, under their own brand.

Many Web Developers who create websites for clients become Resellers by offering to host and maintain these websites as well. They often make an additional profit on this hosting as well.

However, the server maintenance for Resellers is usually performed by the Web Host who actually sold the disc space to the Resellers originally.

This allows the Resellers to basically act like a Shared Hosting Provider like “Middle Man” without having to do all the technical server maintenance themselves.

The Reseller is then allowed to focus primarily on maintaining the WordPress websites that he is hosting through his Reseller plan.

Is Shared Hosting good?

Trusting is good for brand new websites and those on a budget. Should hosting is normally the cheapest of self hosting options out there.

This is the reason why sure hosting is usually the go to hosting plan for new websites.

In fact, not only new webmasters use shared hosting in order to save money, but many webmasters who have numerous websites also have a Shared Hosting plan in their arsenal.

Shared Hosting plans allow webmasters who have many websites to test out new website ideas and see how they look and perform on the internet live, without breaking the bank.

You can find many Shared Hosting plans for as low as $5 to $10 a month.

Many web hosts even offer to host unlimited websites on these Shared Hosting plans. If they don’t, they usually at least give the customer a certain amount of disc space.

On this disk space of course the new webmaster may host several websites and are limited to only the amount of disc space their websites use up.

But, you’d be surprised how many websites you can fit on a few Gigabytes of disc space. Especially if you don’t host any resource intensive media files.

What are the disadvantages of Shared Hosting?

Although Shared Hosting is good, especially for beginners, it also has some disadvantages. The main disadvantages for Shared Hosting are:

Limited Resources.

Because Shared Hosting plans either come with limited disk space or if they offer to host unlimited websites, you will learn soon enough when you’ve hit those limits by your Shared Hosting company.

You will then be requested to either purchase a higher disc space plan or pay for the extra resources used.

Slower Speeds.

Most Shared Hosting plans require a website owner to share a server with many other websites.

Since the resources are shared, the speeds can be lower.

This is why many who are looking to increase loading times and speeds for their websites, usually graduate to a higher plan like Cloud Hosting, a VPS or even to a Dedicated Server.

Potentially being hosted on a Shared Server in a “Bad Neighborhood”.

Since Shared Hosting involves many websites sharing one server with limited IP numbers, many times you cannot control which websites are sharing the Shared Server your website is on.

Therefore, your website does have the potential of sharing a server with less than scrupulous webmasters. These could include porn sites, spammers, gambling etc.

If your business relies heavily on email marketing, this may limit and impede your efforts as far as delivery rates go.

Many email services blacklist IP addresses based on complaints of spam etc.

Also, they may lack list IP numbers and addresses that are associated with illegal websites or websites that are against advertiser and email marketing providers terms of service. You do not want your website to be associated with these “bad neighborhoods”.

Is Shared Hosting good for beginners?

Even with the disadvantages that I’ve listed above, Shared Hosting is still good for beginners.

In fact, I highly recommend that if you are just starting a new website that you pick yourself up a Shared Hosting plan.

Even if eventually your website grows to the point where you will need to increase your server resources, keeping a Shared Hosting plan as a backup is a great way to get a new website up live fast on the internet.

Like I said above, anytime you get new ideas for websites and buy a bunch of domain names, you may then want to test these out and get them on the internet and see how they look ad perform.

You can do this much more cheaply if you simply have a Shared Hosting plan to throw them up on.

I personally have had the same Shared Hosting plan for 10 years even though I now use other web hosting providers with other plans like VPS and Cloud Hosting for some of my other sites.

However, I still keep my tried and true Shared Hosting plan just for those situations.

Is Shared Hosting slow?

Shared Hosting certainly isn’t the fastest hosting on the internet today.

However, some Shared Hosting providers have surprisingly faster speeds than what you would expect from a Shared Hosting provider.

But, in general as I had mentioned above, Shared Hosting is slow due to the fact that it shares its resources with many other websites on the same server.

How much traffic can a Shared Hosting handle?

Estimates vary greatly on the amount of traffic a Shared Hosting plan can handle. Some estimates have it at 1.5–2k traffic per hour.

While others say Shared Hosting can handle 7–12k visits per day. Many say that after your website starts hitting 2-3k visits per day that you should start looking at upgrading your hosting to a VPS or a Cloud Hosting plan.

There are many factors that you need to consider that can greatly affect the amount of traffic your Shared Hosting plan can handle and these include your Host and how up to date their hardware and servers are. How well you optimize your site, etc.

Bottom line is you should upgrade your website’s plan from a Shared Hosting plan to something more when your website’s performance and loading times begin to drop. It’s really your call.

What is the advantage of Shared Hosting?

Just as there are disadvantages to Shared Hosting there are also some advantages. The main advantage of course is price.

If you truly want to self-host a website without any limitations like you would on a free website hosting plan, then Shared Hosting is probably your best option.

With Shared Hosting being so affordable you can host many different websites on the same plan and all from one dashboard like cPanel, which is offered by many web hosting providers who offer Shared Hosting.

Why is Shared Hosting cheap?

Shared Hosting is so cheap because it simply divides up the space on one server among many websites and clients.

This allows the web hosting provider to conserve the resources off of one server instead of many and make a tidy profit in the process.

Is VPS faster than Shared Hosting?

VPS is generally faster than Shared Hosting. Since VPS normally doesn’t share its service space among a literally unlimited amount of websites.

It means that fewer websites are using its resources, therefore, higher speeds are almost a given.

It’s important to note that VPS hosting is not the same as Dedicated Server Hosting. In VPS Hosting, usually a web hosting provider will still divide up the server space.

However, instead of hundreds of websites or webmasters sharing the same server you can basically get one server shared with typically only two to four webmasters.

Web Hosting Providers do this by portioning off one server in halves of quarters depending on the Hosting Provider.

This portioning off of one server means the amount of resources available to one webmaster becomes much higher than those offered by Shared Hosting. This makes VPS Hosting much faster than Shared Hosting.

How does Shared Hosting work, final thoughts.

In the end, Shared Hosting works great for absolute beginners or for those just getting started on the internet and hosting their first website or websites.

Shared Hosting is also good for webmasters with many websites who are looking for a cheap way to get a fresh new website up on the internet as fast as possible. Shared Hosting plans also range in price.

However, on average you can expect to pay well under $10 a month which works out to probably $100-$120 a year.

Although many popular Shared Hosting providers do offer specials, especially for the first year, those prices may even be half of what their normal yearly plan rates are. So always be on the look out.

In conclusion, Shared Hosting works best for those looking to save some money on web hosting since it is the cheapest self-hosting plan on the internet today.