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Shared web hosting has allowed webmasters around the world to easily and cheaply launch websites, blogs, and pretty much any online endeavor, but how does shared hosting work? and why has it become so cheap while the included diskspace and bandwidth has
increased 1,000 fold? These are all questions that will be answered today.

Web hosting can be broken down into two things in order to better understood. The first part of hosting is a location where you keep the
pages, pictures, and anything else you want available. The second part is invisible to most people and is an address service that tells every
computer where your hosting is located. When you combine these things anyone in the world can load your “address”, or URL and they will get to see the pages you are storing on your hosting. This is a pretty simplistic way of looking at it but an easy way to visualize the process.

Shared web hosting is cheap because it doesn’t take many resources to store and show web pages unless a site is very popular. A hosting
company buys a computer called a server, which is just like your home computer except smaller so they can stack them, and then on that
server they can put as many people as the server can handle. So they might be 300 shared web hosting accounts on one server. That is why it
is so inexpensive to get web hosting, as the price of a computer has gone down it is cheaper to setup hosting at a cheap rate.

The problem that has emerged from this is that lots of small hosting companies cram thousands of people onto one server and the server gets
overloaded causing email and websites to go down. It is important when looking for a host that you make sure they are a well sized company
with tech support watching 24/7 and not overselling the hosting they offer. Once you have outgrown shared web hosting you can move to a
dedicated server which means you have the entire computer to yourself and thus can handle a lot more visitors. A website like BBC has
hundreds of servers so that they can handle all their visitors.

Hopefully that helps you understand shared web hosting and why it has become so inexpensive.

This article was written by Ben or UK2 ,  a  UK based web hosting
company founded in 1988.