Definition
Shared hosting is a hosting model where one physical server hosts many customer accounts that all draw from the same pool of CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth. It is the cheapest and most common form of web hosting, typically priced from about 2 to 10 GBP a month. Each account is isolated at the file level and gets its own control panel, usually cPanel or Plesk, but the underlying hardware and network connection are pooled across every tenant on the box. Providers throttle resources per account so one busy site cannot take down the rest, though performance still varies depending on what neighbouring accounts are doing at any given moment. Shared hosting suits blogs, portfolios, brochure sites and small-business sites under roughly 10,000 monthly visitors, where predictable low traffic matters more than guaranteed capacity. Once a site needs custom software, more memory, or steady performance under load, it has outgrown what shared hosting can offer and a VPS becomes the sensible next step.
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.