What is Shared Hosting?

Shared website hosting is where multiple websites are hosted on the same server; each website is contained within its own folder or location on the server to keep it separate from other websites which are hosted on the same server.

Shared hosting is seen as the most economical type of website hosting since the cost of server maintenance as well as other server related costs are spread across a large amount of customers, meaning that the cost of hosting for each customer is low; generally the more customers that can be fitted onto a high performance server, the less the website hosting package or packages will cost.

Where to get Started?

Shared hosting is normally where most webmasters begin, and then work their way up the chain to eventually owning a dedicated server; this is because shared hosting packages are generally every cheap, and the amount of skilled needed to begin with is very low.

Shared hosting is normally only available on two different types of operating system: Linux and Windows; this is because most web applications are built to suite either one of these platforms, and hosting control panels are only mainly made for Linux and Windows. One thing to note though is that there are a few hosts who do offer shared hosting on BSD based systems, although BSD operating systems are only normally available on dedicated servers.