The Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting

December 29th, 2010

Just as the name implies, a website owner using a shared hosting service will need to share resources with other shared hosting service users. This means that typically, a shared hosting service provider will set up a server with a certain number of accounts with common features for all users to take advantage of. However and before considering a shared hosting service, there are a number of pros and cons to consider.

What Are the Benefits of Shared Hosting?

The major benefit of a shared hosting service is that users will get all the necessary features needed to properly manage and run their website. Moreover, most shared hosting services come with similar features that are designed to be user friendly. In fact, most shared hosting services will come with a user control panel with cPanel being the industry standard. Hence, a website owner can quickly get their website up to speed without many hassles or problems.

Just as important, the costs associated with shared hosting are relatively low with some providers charging fees of only a few dollars per month. This makes shared hosting extremely affordable for small business owners or entrepreneurs who want to put up a website or an online business.

What Are the Disadvantages of Shared Hosting?

However, shared hosting also has its share of disadvantages with the primary disadvantage being that your website will share a server with hundreds of other users and perhaps thousands of other websites. In other words, if one or some of those other websites start to experience a spike in traffic, your website’s performance may be impacted.

Another potential disadvantage with shared hosting is security. While most of the time security will not be a problem as the provider will have proper security measures in place, an attacker could find and exploit a hole in the security of one of the websites on the server and use it to attack other websites.

Other disadvantages with shared hosting include potential limitations regarding CPU, memory usage, disk space, bandwidth and on the number of files on one account (inodes).

The Bottom Line

If you own a website that receives a relatively small amount of traffic or a non-critical website, shared hosting may be the best and most cost effective type of web hosting service for you to consider.