With the advent of time, several type of web hosting emerged in the market which can broadly be divided into various categories as under.
One can get hosting service both Paid and Free; Linux/Unix-based and Windows-based (other which are inferior in terms of popularity); shared, dedicated and VPS. However each of this type of hosting has its own merits and demerits.
But the main objective of this article is to explain user about the prevailing merits and demerits of shared hosting.
However, before that user should understand what is the term "shared hosting".
Shared hosting is type of hosting in which a host provides space to a user on his/her server which he/she has to share with other customer's web sites. Same software and operating system is applied by all web sites. With this type hosting however a user can have more advantages as compare to free web hosting.
One can again divide Shared web hosting into two categories:
Free Shared Hosting:
It is considered an ideal choice for a person trying some new concepts and who is not interested in paying money for paid hosting. This type of web site hosting provides the user with everything which is required for boosting his/her site. However, one cannot avail excellent facilities for his/her site. Site will receive restricted amount of Bandwidth and Disk Space. Such type of hosting will not guarantee user with MySQL, PHP support. Web statistics will also be of worst condition.
Paid Shared Hosting:
This will provide all the essential features which free shared hosting seldom to provide, these include e-mail, MySQL, and PHP support. One can use it if he/she wants to host small business web site, intermediary or large professional site but don't requires the entire server's space. Via shared hosting one can get a good possibility to host his/her site on an influential, well administrated server at a cheap per month cost.
Shared hosting is quite popular among the webmasters who are beginners, because of providing reliable web service to that user also who do not have unique technical skills.
As now one must have understood what is the shared hosting, we can come to merits and demerits of shared hosting:
Features in favor:
A. Low cost
B. Fine server administration
C. Multiply e-mail, MySQL, PHP support
Users don't having special knowledge in web site and server administration can also conclude it very well.
Features in against:
A. Low security level
B. Resource limitation - same memory, CPU and Hard Drive is used by everyone. The user is compelled to use only that software which is provided with his/her particular hosting company, and likewise one cannot install his/her own server.
Other restrictions can be due to security policies of the company.
The best part of shared hosting is that one doesn't need to worry about possible server problems as for this hosting company's support service is available to sort all problems. Thus, while selecting a shared hosting one should carefully examine the company support's quality, the better the quality of support - the better would be the conditions for site.
Also with shared hosting one can place several sites in the neighboring parts of the server.
So, finally after knowing all the pros and cons it is on the user to decide the one which is most suitable as per his/her needs.
