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The shared hosting is one of the methods most used by companies engaged in the business of web hosting. Depending on the resources available, it allows you to have a variable number of domains and websites on the same machine.
It is, generally, the most economical form of web hosting and has meant a small revolution since its reduced costs (generally less than $10 per month) have made it possible for many professionals to have been able to take their activity to the online world as well.
Features
In shared hosting, all hosted websites share the available resources. Depending on the type of processor, memory, disk space and system load, the number of sites hosted can vary from a few to hundreds and even thousands. Shared hosting is an economical alternative to dedicated servers and virtual servers.
Web hosting companies generally assist using control panels (assistant programs that allow domains, sites and servers to be managed automatically or semi-automatically from an interface, usually web), such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, InterWorx, H-Sphere and ISPConfig.
Most web hosting companies use GNU / Linux operating systems, although some providers also offer solutions based on Microsoft Windows or FreeBSD.
Advantages
- Web hosting costs have been decreasing due to a growing demand from organizations, companies and people who wish to have an Internet presence.
- Technological advances have resulted in significant increases in the computing power of server machines, which has allowed companies to host more sites on the same machine. In addition, the benefits of a good hosting today are sufficient to host even more than one website (with different domains) in a single web hosting account, which is also known as multi-domain hosting.
- Technological advances have also been reflected in a decrease in the rental cost of server machines, which has resulted in a decrease in the operating costs of companies engaged in the web hosting business.
Disadvantages
- It is common that, over time, security flaws appear in a shared hosting system. This is because, generally, there is a large number of websites hosted on the same machine, with administrators (webmasters) that are independent of each other, which carry out their developments using a large number of different applications (a great diversity of CMS, Content Management Systems), which makes it difficult to maintain the programs that run on the web server. This results, over time, in increasing the number of security flaws, as vulnerabilities are discovered in applications that are not regularly updated. This increases the overall vulnerability of the system.
- All sites share server resources, therefore an oversold may cause performance problems that end up affecting all sites hosted on the machine.
- In a shared hosting, all sites depend on "what the neighbor does," both in terms of security and performance.
