Shared hosting

A shared web hosting service refers to the web hosting service where on one web server many websites reside that are connected to the Internet. Each site “sits” has its own partition, or section on the server, to keep it separate from other sites.

This is the economical option for hosting, as many people do share the overall cost of server maintenance.

The hosting service often includes a system administration as it is shared by many users. This is a benefit for the users who don’t deal with it, but it becomes a hindrance to the power users who want more control.

In general shared hosting will not be beneficial for those users who require an extensive software development outside what a hosting provider supports. Almost all the applications that intend to be on a standard web server works fine with a shared web hosting service. Whereas, on the other hand, shared hosting is cheaper than any other type of hosting such as dedicated server hosting.

In shared hosting, the provider alone is generally responsible in managing servers, security updates, technical support, installing server software, and other aspects of the service. Most of the servers are based on Linux operating system and LAMP, that is driven by the reliability and security of an open source software such as Linux and Apache.

Implementation is done in two ways:

1. Name-based:Here, the virtual hosts with a single IP address serves many host names.

2. IP-based:Here, web server with multiple physical network interfaces on same physical interface is configured.

Name-based virtual hosts have got some of the disadvantages:

They hardly work with very old HTTP/1.0 browsers that dont send the hostname as part of the requests.

By default, they are not able to properly support the secure websites using HTTPS.

All name-based virtual hosts that make use of the same IP address must share same digital certificate as the SSL/TLS handshake takes place even before the hostname is sent to the server.

If the DNS changes haven’t been propagated to all IPs’ resolvers or the Domain Name System is malfunctioning, then it is not possible to fall back to use the IP address in order to contact the system.

But, some web hosting companies might offer an alternative urls to provide access in such cases.

If the file permissions are not configured properly, then the shared file systems might even give other users wide access to these files.