Shared hosting explained
Shared hosting is the "apartment building" of the web: one physical server, hundreds of tenants, shared plumbing. It's how most sites on the internet get online — and where most people also get stung by hidden limits.
How shared hosting actually works
Your host takes one server — often 32–64 CPU cores and hundreds of gigs of RAM — and slices it into user accounts managed by a control panel like cPanel or DirectAdmin. Every account shares the same web server (Apache, LiteSpeed, or Nginx), the same PHP pool, the same MySQL instance, and the same IP address.
That's why it's cheap: the cost of the hardware, the OS licence, the data-centre space and the sysadmin's salary is split hundreds of ways. It's also why "unlimited" plans exist — the host is betting most tenants use very little.
Who shared hosting is for
- Brochure sites, portfolios and small business landing pages.
- A WordPress or Ghost blog doing under ~50k monthly pageviews.
- A small store on WooCommerce, Prestashop or similar with a modest catalogue.
- Staging or client demo sites you don't want to run on your dev machine.
The limits nobody puts on the sales page
"Unlimited" almost always means "unlimited within our acceptable use policy." The real limits usually live one click away:
- • Inodes (individual files) — often capped at 100k–500k. WordPress plus a plugin-heavy site can eat this fast.
- • CPU seconds / EP (entry processes) — how many PHP workers can run at once. Traffic spikes hit this before bandwidth.
- • RAM per process — commonly 512MB–1GB. Import a big database and it dies.
- • MySQL connections — 15–30 concurrent is typical. Chatty plugins burn through them.
- • Email accounts and outbound mail per hour — often 500/hour, which sounds fine until a contact form gets scraped.
The signs you've outgrown shared
- • Your host emails about "resource abuse" more than once a quarter.
- • Admin pages take 3+ seconds even when traffic is quiet.
- • You've been told to "optimise your site" instead of getting more resources.
- • You need SSH access, cron beyond every 15 minutes, or a custom PHP module.
What to look for when buying
- 1. NVMe storage, not "SSD" without qualifier.
- 2. LiteSpeed or LSCache if you run WordPress — dramatically faster than plain Apache on cheap hardware.
- 3. Free SSL via Let's Encrypt, one-click install.
- 4. Daily off-site backups included, with self-serve restore.
- 5. Free migration from your current host.
- 6. PHP version choice — 8.2 or newer, switchable per site.
- 7. A real renewal price you can live with, not just the intro rate.
Compare shared hosting plans
Put shared plans head-to-head on storage, bandwidth, features and real renewal price — no affiliate math.