SHARED HOSTING

Shared hosting is the cheapest and most common hosting model: a single physical server runs many customer accounts that share CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth. Each account is isolated at the file level and given its own control panel (usually cPanel or Plesk), but the underlying resources are pooled. It is the right choice for blogs, brochure sites, portfolios and small-business sites under roughly 10,000 monthly visitors, with prices typically £2 to £10 per month. The trade is that performance varies depending on what other tenants on the server are doing.

How it works

On a shared server, the hosting provider runs the operating system, the web server (often Apache or NGINX with LiteSpeed), the PHP runtime, MySQL, and a control panel. You upload your files through cPanel, FTP or git, and the server handles the rest. Resources are throttled per account to stop one tenant taking down the whole box.

Why it matters

For a site that does not yet justify a VPS, shared hosting is unbeatable on price-to-capability. The downside is the noisy-neighbour problem and that you cannot install anything the host does not offer. Once a site starts to need more memory, custom software or consistent performance, it has outgrown shared.

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Frequently Asked Questions