What is a shared hosting service?
The shared hosting service refers to the most commonly offered hosting service where a number of users share the resources of a server. Each user has their own account on the server and, depending on the account's features, has a partition of the server's resources.
Why sign up for a shared hosting service?
With the shared web hosting service all the users share the cost of the server maintenance, which makes it the most economical hosting option for a large selection of users. Because of the excellent price/quality ratio of the fully featured shared hosting packages, they are suitable for personal web pages, company and business websites, and also for e-commerce solutions. Actually, some shared hosting packages provide more features and services than the expensive VPS and dedicated hosting solutions.
Shared hosting plans usually include a web-based Web Hosting Control Panel. The users are also provided with many easy-to-use tools and wizards to help them set up their websites easier.
For example, we, at NTC Hosting, provide a 1-click PHP script installer for free with all our web hosting plans. With our CMS Hosting plans we go even further – all Joomla, WordPress, 4images and eLearning plans include a free script installation during the account setup, so your web hosting account comes with a pre-installed website environment.
Other useful website building options come with our Value, Plus and Exclusive packages. They include a free website builder software solution, which enables everyone - from complete novices to experienced webmasters - to create a unique and professional looking website with several mouse clicks.
Shared hosting limitations
The shared web hosting server hosts multiple websites, which share its disk space, memory and connection to the Internet. That’s why, in order to grant a quality service to all the clients on a given server, the shared hosting plans have some limits on the number and type of the connections made to a website. Also, most shared hosting servers have a load balancing software installed and impose CPU load limitations on their clients. If a client's script or website uses more that the allowed CPU load quota, then the server temporary blocks the process responsible for the load. This way it keeps all other clients’ websites running faster and smoother.
Other limitation of the shared hosting service is the disk space quota. It refers to the amount of the storage space which the customers can use for their websites. There are also database storage limitations which refer to the size of the disk space on a database server where the clients store their databases.