Advantages and Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

Even if the host provides measures that distribute the performance of the server fairly across the customer websites, you still only have a small share. The hosters have taken a lot of precautions here too, but if you share such a server with others, there are certain security risks.

Shared hosting is the most widely used hosting option on the Internet. Many small businesses, self-employed and private individuals use this hosting option. 

What are the advantages and disadvantages of shared hosting and what my experience is with it, you will find out below?

What is shared hosting?

A large number of customers are accommodated on one and the same server (the computer that hosts websites). They share the resources of this server, e.g. RAM, CPU performance, hard disk, etc. Sometimes hundreds of customers are accommodated on one server As a customer, you have almost no influence on the settings of the server. 

The advantages of shared hosting have a number of advantages. Above all, shared hosting is cheap. Since many customers share such a shared hosting server, everyone has to pay relatively little. It starts here from 1$ / month. Private individuals in particular can save a lot of money here. Shared hosting is often sufficient for small websites. Not every website needs that much performance. Static websites or small blogs in particular do not need a lot of power. 

The hoster takes care of all the important settings, updates, and maintenance work. As a customer, you don't need to worry about technical details, which is very convenient for beginners. Often, special user-friendly tools are integrated, which, for example, enable software to be installed with one click. Shared hosting tariffs include the most important services, tools, and programming languages supported. For example PHP and MySQL. 

Disadvantages of shared hosting 

There are also a few disadvantages of shared hosting. First of all, the performance (loading time) must be mentioned. Even if the host provides measures that distribute the performance of the server fairly across the customer websites, you still only have a small share. And if other websites, for whatever reason, put a heavy load on the server, the other customers suffer as well. Another important point is security. The hosters have taken a lot of precautions here too, but if you share such a server with others, there are certain security risks. Once the server itself has been hacked, your own website suffers as well.

 

The storage space of a shared hosting plan is often limited. After all, all customers share the hard drive capacity of the server. If you want to host large amounts of data (e.g. photos), there may be limits here. Of course, you can't really set anything on the server yourself, after all, that affects all customers. More experienced users will be disappointed with the few customization options. With some hosters, shared hosting customers have worse support than if you rent an expensive server. This is understandable in a certain way. Shared hosting is completely sufficient, especially for smaller niche websites with a few thousand visitors a month.

For those who start small or are only planning a smaller website anyway, such a cheap is usually completely sufficient. And if the websites do grow, you can still easily switch.