What Is Shared Hosting? How It Works and Who It Is For

Shared hosting is the type of hosting almost every small website in Pakistan starts on, and for good reason. It is the cheapest way to put a site online, and for most business sites it is all you will ever need. This guide explains what is actually being shared, how the limits work, and how to tell when you have outgrown it.

What shared hosting actually means

A web server is a computer in a data center that stays online around the clock and sends your pages to visitors. With shared hosting, one server is divided among many customer accounts. Each account has its own folder, its own databases, its own email and its own login, but the hardware, the operating system and the web server software are common to everyone on that machine.

Think of it as an office building rather than a house. You rent a locked office, arrange it how you like, and nobody else can walk in. The electricity supply, the lift and the building's internet connection are shared with the other tenants. The landlord's job is to make sure no single tenant uses up those shared services.

In practice the host enforces those limits per account. If one site suddenly gets a burst of traffic or runs a badly written script, the server caps that account at its allowance rather than letting it slow everyone else down. That cap is what you see listed as CPU share and entry processes on a plan page.

That is why shared hosting is affordable. The hardware cost, the software licences and the system administration are split across many accounts. You pay a fixed yearly amount in rupees and never have to think about the server itself.

What is shared and what is yours alone

The isolation is the important part. On a properly configured server, another customer's site being hacked does not give the attacker access to your files. That is a server-level setting, and it is one of the things you are paying the host to get right.

How the limits work on a shared plan

Because the hardware is shared, every account has a ceiling. Storage and bandwidth are the numbers on the pricing page, but the limits that decide how your site feels under load are CPU share and entry processes.

• Storage: the disk space for your files, images, databases and email. Email is often the surprise, because an unattended inbox can fill several gigabytes in a year.
• Bandwidth: the total data sent to visitors per month. A text and image site with a few thousand visits uses a small fraction of even a 100 GB allowance.
• CPU share: the fraction of a processor core your account can use at once. Our entry plan gives 25% of a core; the top plan gives a full core.
• Entry processes: how many requests your account can handle at the same instant. Fifteen sounds low, but each request usually finishes in well under a second, so fifteen concurrent slots serve a large number of visitors per hour.
• Databases and addon domains: how many separate applications and separate websites you can run on the one account.

Most sites never touch these ceilings. A brochure site on the Promotional plan, with 5 GB of storage and 100 GB of bandwidth, will typically use a small fraction of each. The ceilings exist to protect the server, and a fair host publishes the CPU share and entry process figures rather than only storage and bandwidth.

When you hit a CPU or entry process ceiling, the server does not switch your site off. It slows your requests, and in a sustained overload some visitors see an error page until the burst passes. Our guide to hosting resource limits shows how to read your usage and what to fix first.

Who shared hosting is right for

Shared hosting suits the large majority of websites in Pakistan: company brochure sites, clinics, schools, freelancers' portfolios, small online stores, blogs and landing pages for ad campaigns. If your site is mostly pages, images and forms, and your traffic is in the hundreds or low thousands of visits a day, shared hosting handles it comfortably with caching.

It also suits agencies and freelancers who look after several client sites. A plan with addon domains lets you host each client on its own domain from one login, which is far easier to manage than a separate account for every client.

Shared hosting versus the other labels you will see

You will also see WordPress hosting, cloud hosting and reseller hosting advertised. Most of those are shared hosting with a different label or a preinstalled application. What changes the underlying model is whether you get a reserved slice of hardware and root access, which is what a VPS or a dedicated server gives you. If there is no root access and the host manages the operating system, it is shared hosting in the sense that matters.

When you have outgrown it

You have outgrown shared hosting when your site needs a full server's worth of CPU or memory for hours at a time, when you must install custom server software, or when you need root access. Examples are a large marketplace with thousands of products and constant searches, a video platform, or a custom application with long-running background jobs.

At that point a VPS or a dedicated server is the next step. ProWebHosting does not offer those. We focus on doing shared hosting well, and we will tell you honestly if your project has moved beyond it.

What you get with ProWebHosting shared hosting

Every one of our hosting plans runs on DirectAdmin on servers in Europe, and every plan includes the same core: a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, email accounts on your domain, MySQL databases, a one-click installer for WordPress, and a PHP version selector. The plans differ in storage, bandwidth, CPU share, entry processes and the number of domains and databases.

Prices are in rupees, billed yearly, and you can pay by JazzCash, Easypaisa or bank transfer. Every plan carries a 99% uptime guarantee and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if shared hosting turns out not to fit, you are not locked in. Support runs on WhatsApp and email from Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Pakistan time, with emergency support around the clock for outages. If you are running WordPress, our WordPress hosting page covers what the installer sets up for you.

Frequently asked questions