Shared hosting is the basis of all website hosting packages. You’ll most often see it as the cheapest option of the services offered by a website hosting company. The reason it’s the cheapest is because it is as basic as hosting can get. Your website will be bundled onto a server with a bunch of other random customers’s websites, there is little dedicated or personalized to you. As you can imagine, this comes with its problems as your website shares the server resources with every other user’s site on the same server as yours. If any one of the sites experiences high traffic or bandwidth, it takes away from the performance of other websites hosted in the same place.
Another problem with sharing a server with other user’s websites is the fact that you all share 1 IP. This can and normally does affect your SEO efforts, as if another website on the server is involved with illegal activity, adult material or partakes in black-hat SEO this can negatively affect how your site is perceived by Google and other search engines. Unfortunately, as shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting, the likelihood of someone on the same server as you being part of these frowned upon activities is higher.
Enough of the negatives, what’s great about shared website hosting?
It’s affordable! Thanks to shared hosting, anyone can get their website up and running for less than $2 a month (in some cases), which is brilliant for anyone who doesn’t have the budget to run their own server. If you haven’t looked into getting a website in a few years, the low pricing that shared hosting provides is far, far lower than you would have seen before. I remember a time when having a website of your own would cost in excess of $100 per month, it was a serious investment.
Thanks to the cost-effective nature of shared hosting, there is very little risk in testing out new business ideas online. You could pay $10 in total and after a few months can deduce whether or not your idea is worth pursuing. Hosting your own website for a reasonable price is unlikely to ever be risk free, but we’re getting extremely close thanks to shared hosting.