Shared Hosting Checklist

Shared hosting, or virtual hosting, is an affordable way to start your web hosting journey. You share your web server with hundreds, or thousands of other web sites. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Here is a checklist.

Advantages
Disadvantages and Considerations
Conclusion
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Advantages

Your own domain name.
Cost effective and affordable, sometimes even free.
Enough for sites with small traffic and standard features.
You get lower maintenance costs. Shared hosting companies provide standard applications which come together with your web hosting package. Having standard applications allows them for better support, and lowers your maintenance costs - your web hosting provider takes care.
A sharing solution is more standard, hence there is a higher number of applications optimized for sharing. Other web hosting solutions, like a virtual private server, tend to be vendor-specific.

Disadvanteges and Considerations

CPU resources, network bandwidth and disk storage space are shared with other sites on the same physical web server.
You can only install applications which are supported by the web hosting provider (e.g. if you want a certain statistics package, make sure it's supported by your selected web hosting provider. Prepare a list of the applications you need).
Performance depends on the volume of traffic of other websites stored on the same server. When traffic to the other websites grows, your site may suffer and you will have to find another solution. Look for web hosting companies with a low number of websites on each server.
If you need guaranteed / better performance, more customization, or want to develop your own applications, a virtual private server is better. For even better performance, consider dedicated servers.
Share the server with other users brings security issues. For higher security, consider a virtual private server.
Each shared hosting account is limited to host one domain. You may have several domain pointers which point to the same site but pointers are only synonyms, which make it easier for the surfer to find you. If you need multiple domains pointing to different content, you are effectively asking for a virtual private server, or a reseller account (the two are quite synonyms nowdays).

Conclusion

Sharing a web host is a cost-effective way to start if you don't plan for lots of traffic to start with.
Plan to migrate later, when traffic grows.