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What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is the term used to describe many customers sharing one server hosting. Each customer on the server is allocated their own resources such as hard disk space, the server software then handles requests for each of the websites sharing the server simultaneously.

How popular is shared Linux/Windows hosting?

Shared hosting on the Linux/Windows platform is the most popular form of web hosting today. Low costs, reliability, and ease of use have all played a part in making shared hosting the most popular option for small and medium sized websites.

Shared Hosting features that one must look for

Each company offering shared hosting will often offer a range of features with each package/plan, and you as the consumer can choose the package that most closely suits your needs. You will find that each plan offers a varying amount of bandwidth, disk space, and other add-ons like databases such as MySQL, MS SQL, MS Access, and scripting languages such as PHP, ASP, ASP.Net.

What is the history of shared hosting on Linux?

In 1994 before the Internet boom started, hosting a website would mean having a dedicated server for each website you wanted to host, simply because there was no web server software or protocols available to handle multiple websites per server. This of course was very expensive, so was not very popular. The HTTP/1.1 protocol developed in 1996 provided a means for web servers to host more than one web site per IP by forcing the client software (your web browser) to send a "Host:" HTTP header with each request, indicating which website on the server was being requested. Thus shared hosting was born. Shared hosting allowed the Internet boom to really begin, cheap shared web hosting meant small companies could for the first time afford to develop their online presence. The Apache web server, the most popular web server software today, was made HTTP/1.1 compliant in its later version. Now, nearly all web server software on both Windows & Linux platforms support a shared hosting environment.