Shared hosting, just by the name alone, may seem to be a little less than dedicated hosting. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Shared hosting does have some limitations but, for the target market, these limitations are seldom realized in anything but theory.

Shared hosting does involve your site sharing server space with at least one other site; likely several others. Web servers are incredibly powerful and fast machines. They can easily handle the bandwidth demands of several small sites with no appreciable degrade in service. For this reason, shared hosting is a very good option for sites with low to moderate bandwidth demand. A dedicated server ensures that the site it holds will always have the entire resources of a server available but, for the vast majority of websites, there simply isn’t any need for that much power.

Your files will not be accessible to any other site owner using your server. As far as the server is concerned, each separate site exists in its own world and these worlds never meet. The fact that most shared hosting servers have their security configured by the webhost’s own personnel is a considerable safety benefit.

Shared hosting may not feature the raw power of a full server but the conveniences are myriad. The greatest of these conveniences is generally the ease with which the site can be set up. On a dedicated server, the site administrator is generally on their own, from OS installation onward.