Shared Hosting PlansA shared web hosting service or plan refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site "sits" on its own partition, or section/place on the server, to keep it separate from other sites. This is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.

The hosting service must include system administration since it is shared by many users, more commonly referred to as a managed server; this is a benefit for users who do not want to deal with server issues or problems, but can be a hindrance to power users who want more control.

Most users find that a shared web service works fine, for the applications most commonly used. Shared hosting is cheaper than other types of hosting such as VPS or Dedicated Server Hosting. Shared hosting usually has usage limits and hosting providers should have extensive reliability features in place. 99.9% uptime is not uncommon within the industry and usually amounts to 10 minutes of downtime a week, or about 45 minutes a month, usually for maintenance purposes. Shared hosting is not appropriate for users who require extensive software development outside what the hosting provider supports.

Shared hosting typically uses a web-based control panel system, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, InterWorx, H-Sphere or one of many other control panel products. Most of the large hosting companies use their own custom developed control panels. In shared hosting, the provider is generally responsible for the management of the servers, installing server software, security updates, technical support, and other aspects of the web hosting service.

Most servers are based on the Linux operating system and LAMP (software bundle), which is driven by the reliability and security of open source software such as Linux and Apache (the 'L' and 'A' of LAMP), and MySQL, PHP, Perl, and Python (the 'M' and 'P' of LAMP). Some providers offer Microsoft Windows-based or FreeBSD-based solutions. For example, the Plesk control panel is available for two operating systems, Linux and Windows. Server-side facilities for either OS have similar functionality (for example: MySQL (database) and many server-side programming languages (such as the widely used PHP web programming language) under Linux, or the proprietary SQL Server (database) and ASP.NET programming language under Windows).