Shared hosting, how does it work?

Shared hosting is a web service where several websites are hosted on the same web server. If you are on this type of hosting plan, your site will share resources with other accounts on the same server. The service provider has less costs this way, and this is why they manage to keep the prices fairly low. People looking for the cheapest hosting solutions will often choose a shared hosting web service.

How does shared hosting work on the provider side?

Why would a provider want to offer their resources to multiple clients? The main reason is, low cost. By hosting more than one website on the same web server, you can charge more money without any cost increase. The provider has the same amount of costs they would have when they would offer the server to just one single client.

Obviously, the provider can’t charge the same monthly fee on a shared hosting server as a dedicated hosting server, as the resources are shared. But with enough clients on the server, more money will come in. So you see, shared hosting is an interesting option for service providers where they can do some good business.

Are there any risks?

As there is only one server hosting multiple websites, the resources are limited. With dedicated hosting the whole web server is available that one client or website, and nobody can snoop any resources away. With shared hosting there is always the risk of overcapacity. If all websites that are on the same server experience heavy traffic at the same time, the server may not be able to handle it.

So why would you risk this? It is a game of probability. The odds of all websites experiencing heavy traffic at the same time are so low that it is worth ‘overselling’ the infrastructure. So, when one website is generating a lot of traffic, all resources can be directed that way. When traffic goes down and another page is gaining traction, the resources focus on the latter. This way, a provider can still offer high quality shared hosting with a limited amount of resources.

Why would clients choose this type of hosting?

As mentioned before, the price is a great selling point for shared hosting. Nobody wants to pay too much. So if there is a cheap option, it will always be an interesting one for many potential customers.

But there are other reasons that people may want to choose a shared hosting web server instead of a dedicated one. Many (possible) clients only have one website they want to have online, and have zero experience with running one. They don’t want the hassle of having to learn how website hosting works. A large part of customers just want to have their website online. If they can make use of pre-installed programs or a user-friendly web interface to keep their page online, they are more than happy. Server maintenance and other server related issues are the last thing on their mind.

So besides the low cost of a shared hosting web server, the ease of use is an important factor for people. If you offer shared hosting as a provider, make sure to mention the user friendliness of your service as a selling point. It might push that possible client in the right direction.

Openprovider and shared hosting

At Openprovider we focus on selling domain names. Since we have many resellers as customers that already have their hosting sorted, or even take care of the hosting themselves, we decide to focus our energy on where our speciality lies. Through our Membership plans you do get a discount on Plesk, an innovative hosting control panel.