As many websites are hosted on a single web server, web hosting providers are able to offer low cost shared web hosting services. Due to cut-throat competition in the web hosting industry, you can even find many web hosting companies offering huge web space and bandwidth.

Shared hosting web servers are managed and maintained by the hosting providers who have highly skilled man-power with specialized knowledge and experience. As a result, you can concentrate on your web business and let these professionals from the hosting company worry about the maintenance and uptimes of the web server.

Even though web resources are shared, web masters can manage their website using control panel or similar tools provided by the web hosting company. They are free to upload files, remove web pages, add database, check web statistic and etc. Also they are allowed to create domain name specific e-mails accounts using these tools.

Today, shared web hosting service comes with web space and bandwidth that are more than sufficient for small business websites. However, you can always add more resources should you overrun the web space or bandwidth usage at extra costs.

Since a physical web server is shared, websites in the shared web hosting have to accept slower server response time when compared to a dedicate server hosting.

In most cases, web hosting providers may take care of the security and performance of the shared server. However, it may happen that some of websites hosted on the shared server may run a malicious program or script or even over-utilize the resources by running a faulty script, and this can bring down the web server. Your website would have to suffer downtimes and inaccessibility as a result.

Moreover, you just need one "bad" website in your shared web server to get your website banned altogether by ISP or search engine due to shared IP address. Most hosting providers offer dedicated IP addresses at an extra cost.

Shared web hosting is more risky when compared to dedicated server as it opens up potential security issues as other web masters having an account on the same web server can hack to your sensitive data. This again depends on how the security of shared accounts is setup by the hosting provider.