Shared hosting is the most popular and most  affordable web hosting plan offered by web hosting providers. It is usually targeted at beginner webmasters.

On this plan, a web site, along with many other websites, is stored on a single web server. It is not uncommon for one web server to host as many as a thousand websites. Each website resides on a small partition created for it on the hard drive of the web server and the websites all share the memory, processing and bandwidth resources of the server they reside on. This significantly lowers the cost charged to each user but as a result of shared resources, can lead to slowdowns or even downtime during peak web traffic periods. As a result, even though most shared hosting plans are advertised as offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth, most web hosting companies will shut down a website if it uses too much of a servers resources as this will affect the other websites residing on that server.

Shared hosting plans provide customers with no control over the server their site is hosted on and customers generally cannot install any custom software on the server. All web server management and installations are done by the web hosting company. Customers do get access to a web based control panel that allows them to manage the web applications that come with their hosting plan. While most beginner web masters are okay with these terms, this limited control together with the shared resources of the server makes shared hosting plans unsuitable for most professional webmasters and corporations looking to host their sites.  

Other features offered by most shared hosting providers include the ability to host multiple unique websites on one hosting account, unlimited email and a host of blogging , forum and other web applications. 

Some web host providers also offer free shared hosting plans. Although this is not recommended for business websites due to the fact that they do tend to have a good bit of downtime from time to time.

The shared hosting industry continues to expand rapidly with hundreds of companies offering hosting plans and it looks to continue to remain the most economical and reliable way for beginner webmasters to host their website.