Shared web hosting also known as virtual web hosting consist of thousands of sites placed on to a single web server. The bandwidth and space provided to these sites is low, due to this low availability of space and bandwidth the charges offered are also affordable by a small business industry.

In shared website hosting, multiple sites are hosted on a single server. Shared hosting provider serves pages for multiple Web sites, each having its own Internet domain name, from a single Web server.

It is the equivalent of leasing office space. A certain portion of the building is yours, with your name on the door, and you can rely on the building manager for security, maintenance, and facilities management. This is called "shared" hosting because your home page has its own domain name (www.mycompany.com).

Although shared hosting is a less expensive way for businesses to create a Web presence, it is usually not sufficient for Web sites with high traffic. Shared server hosting is the best choice for normal websites and smaller ecommerce websites

The problem that arises in this shared web hosting is that when many users try to access a single web site, or web sites present on the same server. The web server runs out or resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth. This makes the response of the web server slower and so it takes a lot of time for the site to open.

Shared hosting is provided under shared Linux hosting platform or shared windows hosting platform.

Shared web hosting can be categorised into 3 subtypes.

It is the best choice for trying some new ideas and not paying for hosting. This type of web site hosting provides you with everything necessary for floating your site. Of course you should not expect the best conditions for your site. If we talk about the shared hosting services in free shared hosting i.e. Bandwidth and Disk Space is limited. This type of shared web hosting may not ensure you with MySQL, PHP support. Web statistics is also poorly provided.

Paid shared hosting plans provide such necessary features, as multiply e-mail, MySQL, and support PHP. You may use it if you want to host small business web site, intermediate or large professional site but don't need the whole server's space. Using shared hosting you get a good possibility to host your site on a powerful, well administrated server at a low monthly cost.

In this type of shared web hosting a third party buys or rents a web server from a web hosting company at a cheaper costs and self becomes a web host. He is then responsible for the entire shared web hosting services and sells space, bandwidth and other services to his customers. It's a bit more problematic as it consist all the disadvantages of shared web hosting and the technical support it provides is also slower as the third party person you called will call his web hosting company and will discuss your problems to them and so it becomes a kind of late communication. This is more preferable for personal web sites.

Cheap website hosting, e-commerce website hosting, personal website hosting, Linux website hosting, business web hosting are different categories of web design and hosting.