Starter
One small site
$3.95 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 1 website
- 10 GB NVMe
- Free TLS
- Daily backups
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In one paragraph
Shared hosting puts your website on a server alongside many other websites, all drawing on the same pool of CPU, memory, storage and bandwidth. It is the cheapest and simplest way to get a site online, it requires no server administration, and it is more than enough for a brochure site, a small blog or a business listing. Its weakness is that your performance is partly in the hands of your neighbours.
Who shared hosting is for
- A first website, a personal site or a portfolio
- A small business brochure site with a contact form and a few hundred visitors a day
- A blog that has not yet found a large audience
- A staging or test copy of a bigger site
- Anyone who wants to spend zero hours a month on server maintenance
Who should skip it
- Busy e-commerce stores, especially during sales periods
- Applications that need a custom stack, background workers or root access
- Anything holding regulated records where tenant isolation must be documented
- Sites where an hour of downtime costs more than a year of hosting
What you typically get
| Item | Typical entry plan | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Websites | 1 – 10 | Whether add-on domains share the same limits |
| Storage | 10 – 100 GB NVMe | Whether backups and email count against it |
| Bandwidth | “Unmetered” | The fair-use clause that defines “unmetered” |
| Databases | Unlimited MySQL / MariaDB | Per-database size caps |
| Included mailboxes | Deliverability and whether IPs are shared | |
| Control panel | cPanel, Plesk or in-house | One-click installers, file manager, DNS editing |
| TLS | Free certificate, auto-renewed | Renewal is genuinely automatic |
| Backups | Daily, 7 – 30 days retained | Whether you can restore without a support ticket |
| PHP | Selectable, 8.2+ | That you can change version per site |
The catch worth understanding
On shared hosting, the resource limits that actually bite are rarely disk or bandwidth. They are CPU seconds, memory ceilings, concurrent processes and inode counts — the quotas that stop one busy account from starving everyone else. Well-run hosts publish these numbers. If a provider advertises “unlimited everything” and does not publish process limits, the limits still exist; you just find them the hard way, usually as a 508 error on your busiest morning.
A useful test before you buy: ask support what happens when an account exceeds its CPU allocation. “We throttle the account and email the owner” is a healthy answer. Silence, or a suspension policy with no warning step, is not.
Performance expectations
A well-configured shared plan running a cached WordPress site will typically serve a page in 200–600 ms from the same continent, and comfortably handle a few thousand visits a day. Add an uncached store, a heavy page builder and a dozen plugins, and the same plan will struggle at a few hundred. The variable is not the plan; it is what you put on it.
Security on a shared server
Modern shared platforms isolate accounts at the kernel or container level, so one hacked site should not be able to read another's files. “Should not” is doing real work in that sentence — the isolation model is worth asking about explicitly if you host anything sensitive. At minimum, expect account-level isolation (CageFS, LVE or equivalent), enforced MFA on the control panel, and a malware scanner that runs without you asking.
Indicative pricing
Business
A few sites, real traffic
$7.95 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 10 websites
- 50 GB NVMe
- Free TLS + CDN
- Daily backups
Pro
Busy small business sites
$13.95 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- Unlimited sites
- 100 GB NVMe
- Higher CPU limits
- Staging included
Sponsored links. Prices are illustrative placeholders — swap in your provider's live pricing and affiliate URLs before publishing.
Watch the renewal price
Introductory shared hosting pricing is usually tied to a 12, 24 or 36 month prepayment, and the renewal rate is frequently two to three times the first-term rate. Work out the three-year total cost, not the monthly headline, and confirm the refund window before you commit.
How to get started
- Choose a plan sized for the next twelve months, not the next five years.
- Register a domain, or point your existing domain's nameservers at the host.
- Install WordPress or your preferred CMS from the control panel's installer.
- Turn on the free TLS certificate and force HTTPS.
- Set up mailboxes — or, better, point MX records at a dedicated mail provider.
- Confirm backups are running, then perform one test restore before you go live.
Ready to move on shared hosting?
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Sponsored link. Indicative example pricing. Replace with your provider's live rates.