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 ).

“Managed Hosting” is a popular term in the web hosting industry. It describes a It hosting service provided from a isolated instance – a physical dedicated server or virtual server (VPS). “Managed Hosting” means that the provider is responsible for technical administration of the server, including but not limited to installation, OS installation and maintenance, network administration, security policy, updates, backups, maintenance and trouble shooting of any server-side programs and applications.

Term “Managed Web Hosting” is a broad term, that might or might not refer to “Manage Hosting”. It might would be used to describe in general that a certain type of IT hosting service is managed by the web hosting provider. It could be either physical server (Managed Dedicated Hosting or Managed Dedicated Server), Virtual Server (Managed Virtual Private Server, VPS, Managed VDS) or any custom-buit or clustered system.

For managed service term that applies to Share Hosting, review “What does Managed Shared Web Hosting mean?”.