Shared hosting explained
Shared hosting puts your website on the same server as hundreds of others, which is why it costs $3–$12 a month. For a small brochure site it's completely adequate. The risk is a neighbouring site getting busy or compromised and slowing you down.
"Shared hosting" is the budget tier of web hosting, and it's what most small business websites use, whether the owner knows it or not. The name describes exactly what it is: one computer, many tenants.
How it works
A hosting company buys a server — a machine with a lot of disk and memory — and divides it among customers. Your files sit in your own folder; your site answers to your own domain. The operating system, the web server software and the database engine are shared.
Economies of scale do the rest. A server that costs the host $200 a month can carry 300 small websites at $8 each. That's why the price is low.
The other tiers, for context
| Type | What it means | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Shared | Many sites on one machine | $3–$12/mo |
| VPS | A slice of a machine, mostly to yourself | $10–$40/mo |
| Dedicated | A whole machine | $80–$300/mo |
| Managed WordPress | Shared or VPS, with WordPress looked after | $15–$80/mo |
A one-person service business with a five-page site belongs in the first row and nowhere else.
What's good about it
- Cheap. Often $4–$9 a month, sometimes less on a first-year deal.
- Nothing to administer. The host patches the operating system, replaces disks, handles the power.
- One-click anything. WordPress installs, SSL certificates, email accounts — all from a control panel.
- Good enough performance for a page of text and two photos.
The one real failure mode
Your neighbours. On a shared server, another customer's site can affect yours in two ways:
- Resource hogs. A site on the same machine gets a traffic spike, the server runs out of memory, and yours gets slow or briefly unavailable. Good hosts limit each account to prevent this; cheap ones do it badly.
- Compromised neighbours. An outdated WordPress site next door gets hacked and the whole server gets flagged, which can land your mail in spam or get your IP on a blocklist.
Neither is common, and both are the reason "cheap hosting" has a bad reputation among people who run sites for a living. For a brochure site with no customer data and no login, the downside is short outages, not catastrophe.
What to look for if you buy it
- A free SSL certificate, installed automatically, renewing automatically. Non-negotiable.
- Backups — daily, and restorable by you without a support ticket.
- PHP and MySQL, if you plan to run WordPress. Most do; check.
- Renewal price. Same trap as domains: $2.95 for year one, $12.99 after.
- A control panel you can understand. cPanel is the standard; some hosts have their own, and some of those are painful.
- Email that isn't an afterthought. If you want
[email protected], check the mailbox limits before you buy — cheapest plans sometimes include one mailbox with 1 GB.
What not to expect
Support that fixes your website. Shared hosting support will help with the server — "my site is down," "my email bounces," "how do I install an SSL certificate." They will not fix your layout, recover a page you deleted, or tell you why your form stopped working. That's not laziness; it's the economics of $6 a month.
If you want someone to fix the website itself, that's a different product at a different price. See hosting vs website builders for the version where somebody else handles all of it.
Should you use it?
If you're running your own WordPress site and you know why, yes — shared hosting is the sensible starting tier, and you can move up when traffic justifies it.
If you're not running WordPress and you're not sure what any of this means, you probably don't want shared hosting at all. You want a builder or a free service where the whole thing is somebody else's job.