What is shared web hosting?

When you do web hosting, you have several solutions (sometimes with names that are a bit cryptic for beginners), you can rent a physical server (dedicated), a virtual server (a VPS, a shared spot on a server, but with your full OS available), or even shared web hosting.

By renting shared web hosting, you're not renting a machine, nor a spot on a machine, but you're renting access to an OS shared between several users, itself shared across several virtual machines.

Technically it doesn't always work exactly like that, but I'm trying to simplify as much as possible.

It's a bit like when you create a new user on your parents' old computer, you can add new software and new files, as long as they don't require administrator rights.

Well, for shared hosting, you rent a user account with limited rights, pre-installed software (web server), and resources shared between several users.

The specifics

Shared web hosting is rather recommended for low or medium traffic sites that don't need a lot of resources to run.

They are generally not recommended for professional use, because it's rare for the host to make it a point of honor for the service to be perfectly stable 100% of the time, and depending on the provider, shared hosting can sometimes be subject to micro-outages from time to time.

Advantages

The undeniable advantage of shared hosting remains the very attractive price. You can easily host one or more sites for only 3 to 4€ per month (excluding domain name) while benefiting from a MySQL database, a PHP engine, a few GB of storage as well as FTP access.

Such hosting is also easier to manage, because an online control panel is automatically provided to you, and even though SSH access to the machine is sometimes provided, you won't need it to set up your hosting.

Be careful though, your SSH access is restricted to very simple actions such as creating, reading, and deleting files.

Normally the management of your file backups is handled by your host, but it's often a backup only in case of a technical incident on the datacenter, and not in case of an error on your part!

Disadvantages

The major drawbacks are:

• Limited performance
• Service availability (micro-outages)
• The obligation to work on a classic stack (PHP, MySQL)
• The lack of configuration of the web server

A few services

The services selected below are either French or European and offer shared web hosting in addition to many other hosting offers (dedicated, cloud, etc.)

• OVH
• Ionos (formerly 1&1)
• O2Switch
• PlanetHoster

Personally I've only used the first two, but I've often seen the last two recommended by other web professionals, so I'll let you form your own opinion!

In conclusion

The drawbacks of shared web hosting are also what makes it strong: simplicity.

This is clearly the type of hosting I recommend to someone who is starting out, and since I believe you only really understand the limitations of a service by using it yourself: go for it, test it, experiment!

And if you're not yet comfortable with VPS, I wrote an article on the subject available right here.