Everything that you wanted to know about Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting, isn’t the name pretty self explanatory?

Shared web hosting is a low cost web hosting service where more than one website shares the same web hosting server. Each website has one separate partition where it resides. The main aim behind shared web hosting is to reduce the overall cost of hosting a website.

Many people start a website only to have a presence on the World Wide Web. Full fledged features and options are the least of their concerns. The only thing that matters to them is an economical hassle free hosting service and that’s precisely what shared web hosting is all about.

The Implementation

Shared web hosting is implemented in two ways.

1. Name Based : The name based virtual shared web hosting is also called Shared IP hosting. In this, the virtual hosts serve multiple hostnames on a single machine. All of them have the same IP address. When someone tries to access a website, then the name of the website is included as a part of the request.


2.IP based : Clearly, the better and more stable option of the two, IP based hosting is also called dedicated IP hosting. In dedicated IP hosting, each host has a different IP address. The server is configured with multiple network interfaces. The server uses the IP address to connect the client to the website that he wishes to access.

Pros and Cons

There are several reasons why IP based shared web hosting is a better option as compared to name based hosting. Here are a few.

• There is very little stability and support for secure websites (HTTPS). Since all name based hosts share the same IP address, they also share the same digital certificate.


• If there are glitches with the domain name or it is malfunctioning for some reason, then the server finds it difficult to connect to the website as it does not have the correct IP address.