shared hosting

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shared hosting is a particular level of webhosting service that includes FTP access with at least PHP and/or Perl CGI on a server where a bunch of people have accounts that share the same filesystem, and the same Apache/nginx process(es). An SSH connection to these servers is often limited or absent, making it impossible to run different processes.

See webhosting#Shared_Hosting for examples and more details.

Advantages

Despite apparent limitations of shared hosting (as compared to other web hosting options like a dedicated server), there are some advantages to developing and maintaining your indieweb site on shared hosting:

  • good design constraint - "I kind of like it as a restriction, seeing what I can do with it" Sebastiaan Andeweg
  • greater re-use potential - "like it as a restriction so that what I develop can be re-used by more people" Tantek Γ‡elik
  • service use-case - "set up XRay on shared hosting to see if I could, and it turns out it works quite well there" Aaron Parecki
  • portability - "it's a good baseline for portability of your own stuff too!" Tantek Γ‡elik
  • ...

FAQ

How to know if on shared hosting

Q: How can you tell if your webhosting service is a shared hosting service?

A: If you can ssh into the server, try ls /home/. If you see an error message like:

ls: cannot open directory /home/: Permission denied

then you're likely on shared hosting service.

See Also