Shared or managed WordPress hosting – many WordPress website owners like you struggle to choose the right WordPress hosting.

Perhaps, you are also confused about how these two kinds of web hosting differ from each other.

With countless web hosting providers with different hosting packages, picking the right hosting tends to be more intimidating. So, you should better understand the key differences to be able to pick the right one for your WordPress website or blog.

Shared hostings are cheap and usually cost between $3 – $10 USD. Some hosts offer shared hosting for free as well. These hosting are great for small sites. In contrast, managed WordPress hostings are better-managed, expensive, and are specific to WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting plans usually cost above $25 to as much as $1000 per month or more.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is simply a hosting plan where your website shares space and resources of a server with other sites. So, hundreds or even thousands of sites are parked together in shared hosting.

You can host a website built with any page builder or CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. It is a hosting platform where many sites share resources with each other in a single server. They share the bandwidth, disk space, and processing power of the server.

By its nature, shared hosting is inexpensive. So, this kind of hosting is ideal for sites that are new or small or with a tight budget. Usually, shared hosting costs around $3 to $5 per month.

Shared hostings are cheap hosting options. But, remember this kind of hosting comes with several responsibilities. Sign up for shared hosting and you have to set up and configure your site yourself.

Some of us may find this DIY task overwhelming. But, you don’t have to worry about it as long as you host on a reliable hosting company. Your website hosting company support team will invest their time in helping you set up WordPress and deal with issues you encounter during the process.

Pros of Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting comes with several benefits. Firstly, it is the most inexpensive option available on hosting. Secondly, you can host websites built on any platform (not just WordPress) in shared hosting. On top of that, the use of a simple control panel lets you take care of your website easily.

Here are the major pros of shared hosting.

Shared Hosting Is Cheaper

As mentioned above, you will share your web server with many other webmasters in shared WordPress hosting. Hundreds of other sites are hosted in a single server. So, the hosting provider can keep the running cost low which reflects in the price of your hosting plan.

The shared hosting plans usually cost from $3 to $10 USD. You will also find some hosting companies providing WordPress hosting plans in more expensive or cheaper price rates than this. But, you get the idea – shared WordPress hosting is pretty affordable to even the small site owners or beginners.

Easy Management With cPanel

Many web hosting companies provide cPanel to website owners to manage their sites. cPanel is a control panel that you can access over a network connection. With cPanel, you can manage databases, domain names, backups, and mail accounts of your WordPress website.

Using cPanel is extremely easy. You don’t need any technical knowledge or even prior experience to use this web-based control panel. So, whatever the features your WordPress hosting plan offers you, you will have no hard time managing them.

Professional Email Service

Many businesses survive on email. Be it communication with team members or customers, email has always been a vital part of businesses.

With shared WordPress hosting, you will get a professional email service without any additional cost. Suppose, if you own a business, blossomthemes.com, then you can set up your business email like yourname@blossomthemes.com for free.

Forget free Gmail or Yahoo email accounts. They look unprofessional. Instead, you can get the benefits of using business emails of your domain. Your email looks brandable, professional, and your customers will trust your email.

You can easily set up new email accounts through your cPanel account.

Cons of Shared Hosting

Pros and cons are interrelated. With each benefit comes a potential pitfall. In shared hosting, your site will not have a dedicated resource. So, your site may have to deal with a few issues if you host it in a shared WordPress hosting.

Comparatively Slow

Unlike Managed WordPress hosting, shared hosting is not configured to run a single platform – WordPress only. Instead,  it should be capable to run different kinds of application and CMS.

So, how does this affect the speed of your site? Since shared hosting has to compromise, or most probably ignore the tweaks and adjustments that would be ideal for WordPress sites. As a matter of fact, it is not only WordPress that shared hosting should look after.

As a result, WordPress sites hosted in shared hosting are not as fast as managed WordPress hosting sites.

Security Concerns

With shared hosting, you will experience limitations in security as well. Your server hosts your site along with hundreds or thousands of other websites in this kind of hosting. So, if a site hosted on the same server as you host your site gets infected, then your website’s security is also threatened.

Hosting high-traffic sites is definitely a no-no

Shared hostings come with limited resources. Since the server is shared between many websites, you will be sharing the resources like bandwidth and disk space with other websites.

If you host a high-trafficked site in shared hosting, it will not just affect your site, but other websites hosted on the same server as well. Simply put, shared hosting is not made for sites or blogs with high-traffic. Even a web traffic spike in a site takes up a lot of resources of the server. This affects the loading speed and performance of the site and the neighbor sites as well.

So, these are the major downsides you may experience while hosting your WordPress site in a shared WordPress hosting. A good host will put the effort into reducing the drawbacks. A good web host will host only a limited number of sites that its server will be capable of handling easily.

Best Shared Hosting Providers

Below is the list of best shared WordPress hosting providers of 2024.

Best Shared WordPress Hosting in 2024