Shared Hosting (or Shared Web Hosting) is a term in the Internet Hosting industry which refers to a number or Virtual Hosting accounts and websites hosted on one physical or virtual instance (server). Each virtual account has its own partition on the server in order to be separated from others. All those hosting accounts share the resources (processor, memory, bandwidth, software) of the underlying server. It can host thousands of websites.

Shared Hosting services is either name-based or IP-based. In IP-based virtual hosting each Shared account uses a dedicated IP address. The host server is configured with multiple physical network interfaces, or virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface. In name-based virtual hosting all Shared accounts on the server share a single IP address. In name-based hosting Web browsers request a resource from the web server of the host server using HTTP/1.1 which includes a certain hostname as part of the request. The host server uses this information to determine which web site to show the visitor.

Please note that term “Virtual Hosting” has nothing to do with “Virtual Private Server Hosting” (VPS, VPS Hosting, Virtual Servers ).

The term (phase) “Linux Hosting” refers to a web hosting service provided form a Linux OS (Unix) based web server. Various Liunux distributions are used as server operating systems. Most of the well known, reliable Internet hosting providers run Linux distributions on their web servers.

Linux OS and Linux based servers are very popular because of the open source software collaboration, which allows the source code to be used, modified and redistributed from anyone. The distribution could be commercial or non-commercial under the GNU General Public License. The Linux OS is packaged in a format known as a Linux distribution. Some of the most popular Linux distributions used on web servers are Red Hat Enterprice Linux, CentOS, Debian, (Ubuntu), Fedora and openSUSE.

Often the term Linux Hosting refers to L.A.M.P Hosting service.