Best Shared Hosting Companies of 2024

No matter the type or size of your business, you need to implement a website to let the customers purchase your products online or find out more about the business you are running.

To have a website, choosing a web hosting is required. For small business owners with low expectations and low budget, shared web hosting will be adapted to their profile.
This article will help you find the most adapted shared hosting for your website, with a great Price/Quality ratio. We’ll expose each web hosting type’s advantages and disadvantages.

First, let’s have a look at different shared web hosting providers that offer affordable and reliable services. Reading customer reviews can be a great idea before you make your final choice.

Learn more about shared site hosting

What is shared hosting?

If you would like to get started and know the fundamentals of web hosting, whether you are an individual or a company, shared hosting can be the best option. It’s the least expensive one. It’s because the maintenance costs are low since they host several hosting accounts in one server.

However, it also has its negative side. Indeed, since all resources are shared, if one website experiences a spike in its daily traffic, the others will be impacted by a slowdown (and sometimes a freeze). Moreover, the support is labeled as “standard”, which means that the level of support is low.

Let’s talk about the two main advantages of subscribing to shared site hosting.

1. The price

The price of shared hosting is much lower than the one of a VPS. Indeed, starting for 5 dollars, you can subscribe to these offers monthly. You may even find hosts that apply much lower prices.

2. Simple and accessible

Once you pay your subscription, all you need to do is to post your data online. Everything is explained on the multiple offers on the market, with no bad surprises.

Safer and cheaper than any other kind of web hosting, shared hosting is a great idea to begin on. Then, when you will wish to upgrade your subscription, you can launch the process and you won’t lose your data. It’s the best option for small and medium-sized websites.

If your budget is limited, then it can be a bit confusing to choose the right offer: the one that is the most adapted to your situation (budget, size of your website…).

But two main hosting websites have to be known: Virtual Private Server (VPS) and Dedicated plan. But those are very expensive, even if the amount of power and the flexibility granted is appreciable.

Shared hosting is the best option if you’re going on a low budget and willing to benefit from the latest technologies.

As we just said, shared hosting provides its members with the most powerful technologies and resources.

Now let’s see it from another side to understand it more in-depth.

Let’s suppose that we rent an apartment in a building composed of 7 others. Each of these apartments is provided with electricity, water, cables that come from one source. The host plays the role of the owner of the building.

Indeed, when you have an issue in your apartment, the first thing you need to do is to get in contact with the owner of the building. He will repair all the issues you face to provide you with the best experience with its services.

In general, we say that an apartment is under the responsibility of its owner. It’s the same for the server administrator of the hosting server. He is in charge of the well-being of the hardware. The software, that the website owners benefit, also has to be up-to-date.

This example is so well adapted to the situation of shared hosting because, in a building, all the resources that are made available are shared by all the owners that share that building. It’s the same with web hosting. Indeed, the fixed amount of CPU, RAM… is shared by all the website owners that share that server.

As much as you can ask for renovations in the flat that you rent, you can ask a web developer to modify your website. Furthermore, you can do it yourself. Indeed, cPanel is a great and easy-to-use tool that you can benefit to make adjustments.

Here is an overview of the main features of shared web hosting.

The mainly used operating systems are Linux or Windows from the huge number of offers on the market. Sometimes, the former is the only one provided.

One thing that websites’ owners forget to consider is the Technical Support, especially when they are beginners. Most people think about the price only.

When you don’t have a clue about how to solve a problem or do something, having recourse to a competent Technical Support would be great.

Being able to get in touch with the shared host for any kind of request is desirable. A lot of these offer online chat services.

However, if you have a common query, then you can fall back on self-help documentation such as the FAQ, the video tutorials and databases.

Shared hosting is certainly the best and most affordable choice for you if you do not plan to develop custom applications. Also, this type of hosting is more suitable for startup websites that do not receive thousands of visitors per day. However, you need to choose a shared host that will allow you to easily move to more advanced hosting plans (VPS, Cloud and Dedicated) the day your site becomes popular.

Shared hosting is a great option aswell for “testing” a particular web host without making any long-term commitment contract or renting expensive hardware.

Shared hosting is a great option for many of you, including inexperienced people in Web Hosting who wish to have access to a very performant service for low costs without spending a lot of time doing web programming.

Also, it’s good for experienced website owners who want to be able to change hosting providers easily.

Shared hosting plan is the right choice for you if you are:

• Beginner with web hosting
• Try a new web hosting provider
• To reduce costs
• Design a small personal website
• It does not require advanced web programming.

During the first launch of your website, you won’t need a lot of bandwidth since the traffic will be low if you don’t use marketing campaigns.

As a beginner, you cannot know the disk space that will be covered by your website (images, content…). Therefore, choosing a shared hosting can be an absolute solution.

Since all the clients of shared hosting own small sites, it’s easy for the host to manage them all.

The great thing with shared hosting is that you can very easily and quickly change the hosting plan.

Indeed, in the beginning, you will choose a cheaper and easier option than when you will become familiar with the domain. This is a great side of shared hosting. You can always adapt it to your situation.

We have carefully selected a list of the best and most affordable web hosting per year.

It’s easy to know when it is the ideal moment to change your hosting plan. When you feel that your business plan requires more advanced and complex scripts, then it’s time to move to a higher hosting plan by modifying the databases, scripting languages, the OS, etc.

You may also need to purchase your own server because most shared hosting plans offer standard LAMP stacks. Therefore, a more powerful server may be needed.

For instance, you may need FreeBSD, Nginx, and PostgreSQL for, respectively, the OS, the Web server and the database.

What is great with shared hosting is its easy-to-use side. Indeed, for a small budget (less than $70 a year in general) and with great technology involved, you will have access to great service.

The idea is to allow a high number of websites to have access to one server to cover its costs. Some hosting companies use full quotas (the host can make profits off it).

Talking about volume, hosting companies also use overselling. As you know, each server has a capacity limit, but most of the websites don’t use full resources. Therefore, the hosting companies often practice the overselling to make even more money and provide their services for even lower costs.

Web Hosts often say that customers have access to unlimited resources (disk space and bandwidth). Let’s see this more in-depth.

If we think rationally, everything has a limit. Now, why do internet hosts say the opposite?

The answer is simple: they play on the customers’ emotions by making an assumption of the mean amount of capacity used by every single customer. Then they can know how many customers to accept in a server.

As we said previously, even if hosts affirm that the resources are unlimited, they actually are limited. But most of the websites are small. Indeed, most of them are personal blogs or showcases that don’t receive more than 1,000 visits.

And most of the time, many of those visits are made by the owners themselves. Therefore, it’s beneficial for the server to have such customers who prefer to choose a low-price subscription because it lets many others subscribe in turn.

As you may have understood, VPS plans, Dedicated Servers, and Cloud give more resources than shared web hosting plans. You will be able to transfer some amount of bandwidth from your website during a certain period.

As you may guess, customers who choose higher-priced subscriptions can be given more storage/priority with technical support (faster response, better coverage…). You will be asked to upgrade your hosting package (usually to VPS) if your website exceeds the “acceptable range” defined by the host and that we talked about previously.

For instance, your website will exceed this range if the traffic is too high, which will cause the slowdown of the server or if the files on your website are too heavy.

Keep in mind that the “unlimited” offer doesn’t exist. Indeed, you will always be asked to upgrade your subscription after a certain amount of resources allocated to your website.

However, it can represent a great solution for you if you use the number of resources defined by the hosting company. It’s generally defined in the “terms of use” document.

Shared hosting is suitable for sites with little traffic. Hosting your site is on the same server as other clients. This includes a problem in terms of performance. If one of the sites hosted on the same server as yours is too resource-intensive, the performance of your own site can be heavily penalized.

We recommend shared hosting mainly for individuals and small businesses who want a showcase site. Generally, you will find indications of the traffic which is allotted to you. Shared hosting may also be suitable for an e-commerce shop provided it does not have too many articles and too much traffic. We advise you for a professional online sales site to turn to a formula adapted to this type of site.

In conclusion, shared hosting is very suitable for small businesses and individuals who want a showcase site to present their offers and the advantage of not requiring any knowledge for the management of the server since it remains the responsibility of the web host.