Shared hosting is one of the most common types of hosting and provided by numerous companies on the web.

From a technology perspective, the way a shared hosting works is that a hosting company creates multiple accounts on a single server. Subscribers then pay for each account and often depending on how much they use in terms of bandwidth and storage. The account access is typically through a web based control panels (cpanel is the most used) and shell access is rarely provided – bluehost.com is one of the very few shared hosting providers who do provide shell access on request. Most hosting providers also provide a one click installation of most common software packages like content management systems (eg. Drupal), blogging platforms (eg. Wordpress) and online forums.

Costs

Leaving apart free blog hosting, shared hosting is one of the most economical hosting packages that you can get. Shared hosting costs starts at about $3/month going to about 15$/month. Tutorial-Reports is hosted on a shared hosting provider call bluehost.com which costs about 7$/month.

Advantages

1. Lost Cost
2. Easy to setup and maintain – and does not require any system administration knowledge as opposed to virtual dedicated and dedicated hosting.

Disadvantages

1. Might not work for high traffic websites which require more space and bandwidth usage.
2. Shell access is typically not provided so is not suitable if you need to do some custom administration or install.
3. Since a single system can have multiple accounts, there are no resource guarantees in terms of CPU or memory usage. Essentially what this means is that incase there is a rogue account in the server where your shared hosting account is located which is hogging CPU or memory resources through long running processes, then it will impact performance of even your website. Though this is something which a good hosting provider will resolve at the earliest if brought to notice. Tutorial-Reports.com has been running with bluehost.com for about two years and we have almost never had such a problem.
4. Shared hosting is typically not provided for sites running on Java/Tomcat and most of the times only support PHP – though ruby support is also slowly gaining ground.

Best Suited For

1. Shared hosting works for about 90% of the sites on the internet. For most content based sites which do traffic from about 100 visits a day to 10,000 visits a day – a shared hosting would work best. Additionally, shared hosting is most suitable for sites running on content management systems like Drupal, Wordpress etc.

Some shared hosting providers:

1. GoDaddy.com – Godaddy has some pretty cheap shared hosting packages which will work well with a wide variety of sites. The only problem is that Godaddy provides very little control and only works on PHP. One needs to be very careful with GoDaddy's online interface which has a very aggressive cross-selling framework and tries to sell you all kinds of bells and whistles along with your barebones account. For a newbie this can be very intimidating and seem almost like dealing with a car salesman. If you are going with Godaddy say “No Thanks” to every other option that they propose and just finish your basic checkout. You can always go back later to review the other bells and whistles that they provide.
2. Bluehost.com – Bluehost.com is slightly expensive as compared to Godaddy – the cheapest option at Bluehost is about 7$/month as compared to Godaddy's $3/month. However Bluehost provides a ton of more features as compared to Godaddy which makes the plan worth it. Some of these are listed below:
   1. Shell access (on request).
   2. Multiple Domains hosting – you can host around 5 websites on a single Bluehost account, so this might actually turn out to be much cheaper than Godaddy.com.
   3. Clean interface and no aggressive cross-selling.
   4. Tons of free scripts in their online panel which make a lot of your tasks easier. Some of these offer a single click installation of popular CMS packages like Drupal and Wordpress, others help in more effective website marketing.

Disclaimer: Tutorial-Reports.com is hosted on Bluehost.com so the author might be biased by a more favorable review to Bluehost.com. There might be other shared hosting providers who provide similar features and similar prices which the author does not know of.