We’ve talked about types of different web hosting in our previous web hosting basic article – shared, VPS, dedicated, cluster, and so on. Wonder which type of web hosting service is the most common used? The answer is ‘Shared Web Hosting’ – and we are going to talk more about it in this article.

A shared web host (also known as virtual hosting) simply refers to a hosting server that’s shared by multiple websites. In other words, websites on a shared web host are ‘housed’ together in the same hard drives, sharing the same server resources like RAM, processing power, hard disk, and in most cases – the same IP address. The number of websites on a shared hosting range from hundreds to thousands.

Advantages of shared web hosting

The main reason why shared hosting is such popular is because it is extremely cheap. VPS hosting normally cost $30 – $40 monthly and dedicated hosting cost $150 – $300 monthly – guess how much shared hosting cost per month? $2 – $8 per month! That’s a huge gap between the price isn’t?

Besides low cost, here are some other advantages of a shared web host

Maintenance free server

A shared server is normally maintained by the hosting provider thus there’s little be done by the website owners. This save lots of time (and manpower) and webmaster can focus on things that really matters – the web content and web marketing part.

Less technical knowledge

A shared hosting often works like a saviour to the non techies as it requires little computer knowledge. Forget about server specifications, Linux operations and firewall! All you need to do is purchase a shared hosting account, install whatever web applications you need, upload your web files, and your website is ready.

Disadvantages of shared web hosting

On the other side, shared hosting does come with couple of disadvantages. For certain irresponsible hosting providers shared hosting means overselling for the maximum profit. These crooks will sell as much as they can and do not care about the shared server capability – thus sabotaging the websites stability and response speed.

Also, a website on a shared server is often sharing the same IP with other websites. Shared hosting users have little control over other users and there’s a big chance that your site will be hosted along side with other spammy websites – which will cause the IP blacklisted.

How does a shared hosting plan look like?

Anyone who’s thinking about starting a website should really check out the hosting market nowadays. To survive in fierce competition, web hosting companies are pushing aggressively to win customers. We are seeing a lot of great hosting companies slicing their price, offering unbelievable incentive gifts (such as Hostgator toll-free numbers with free talk time!) and bargains.

Hence to wrap things up, we would like to show you how the shared hosting plans look like in the real world. Listed below are shared hosting plans offered by our recommended web host – you’ll be surprise how much you can get in such a low price.

(Click in each host to read our evaluation report and customer reviews.)