What is Shared Hosting?
Shared web hosting is also called virtual hosting. The term shared refers to the physical, equal sharing of the server resources like disk space, CPU and ram by all the hosted accounts on a first come, first served basis. That is what makes it different from a VPS, semi-dedicated or dedicated server which may also share server resources but each account has a dedicated share of those resources that the other sites can not use.
Shared hosting is by far the most common type of web hosting account. It is also the most economical option for a full featured hosting account and is entirely adequate for the vast majority of hosted sites. A quality shared hosting account can easily outperform a low end VPS.
Shared hosting typically uses a web-based control panel system, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, Helm or one of many other control panel products. Some hosting providers use modified or licensed versions of these products or have their own home-built control panel. GoDaddy, DreamHost and 1and1 hosting are examples of companies with their own version of a control panel. These control panels make your files and databases private spaces that others on the shared server can not see even though you share a common hard disk.
To illustrate shared hosting let's use the same example as we did in our dedicated server article :
When we add shared hosting to that statement we need to classify it as suite in a nice hotel. Many of the features used are private but many of the common areas are shared.
There are thousands of shared hosting providers in the United States alone. They range in size and quality from a kid in the basement with a DSL connection to multi-million dollar providers with thousands of customers.
Articled revised 11-18-2008