Best Shared Hosting Services in 2024

What Are the Advantages of Shared Hosting?

Cost Effectiveness

One of the main reasons to use shared hosting is that it’s very cheap. The expenses of a hosting company are spread amongst many customers, which makes shared hosting services the most affordable solution for each particular user.

Flexibility

If you host a new or small website, a shared hosting plan can be a good start. You can easily upgrade it as your website grows. A clear indicator of the moment you need to scale up is when your site registers a repeatable growth in visit counts.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Typically, web hosting companies don’t enforce monthly bandwidth limitations for shared hosting services. However, if you require a lot of bandwidth and overload the server, it may harm other domains, and the provider will indicate that you need to upgrade your hosting plan.

Managed by Hosting Provider

The best shared hosting providers take the burden of maintaining the server off your shoulders. The host takes care of hardware and software updates and ensures that administrative tasks function correctly. The technical support team handles regular server maintenance, network outages, DDoS protection, etc.

Multiple Domain Hosting

If you plan to have several websites in one directory, shared hosting makes this easy. Just remember to ensure all your domains are associated with your account.

What Are the Disadvantages of Shared Hosting?

Low Site Speed

Speed is one of the major issues of shared hosting plans. It’s due to many websites utilizing limited resources of a single server. If a popular site happens to be hosted on a server, it will naturally require more resources and affect all the other websites.

In most cases, with shared hosting plans, you should be prepared for a slower site speed and performance compared to other hosting solutions.

Security Issues

The fact is that shared hosting is vulnerable by nature. Hackers can break into one domain and potentially access the entire server and thus all websites hosted on it.

The best shared hosting providers ensure domain isolation, which means that if a particular site is hacked, others don’t get affected so easily. Of course, we made sure that all hosts on our list prioritize high-security measures.

Here you can find out more about how we measure security for web hosting.

Lower Uptime

Server crashes are a common pain point of shared hosting services. This again is due to the nature of this hosting type. Server crashes occur when hosted websites require an excessive amount of RAM and CPU; for users that means that websites hosted on that server become unavailable.

Therefore, ensuring that the hosting provider you choose offers an uptime guarantee between 99.90% and 99.99%, so your website will not go down for more than nine hours per year.

10 Best Shared Hosting Services

Should You Use Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is best for personal use and small businesses that do not expect high traffic volume and want to save as much money as possible on hosting. Usually, within pricing plans, providers specify the number of visits your website can safely handle per month. This number can go up to 30,000 visitors which is more than enough in most cases.

If you are confident that shared hosting is the right solution for your business needs but have difficulty deciding which provider to choose, try our Comparison Tool to compare your options.

If you are still in doubt and want a personalized recommendation on the best web hosting based on your requirements, check out the Finder Tool.