shared hosting

 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 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"
 * greater re-use potential - "like it as a restriction so that what I develop can be re-used by more people" undefined
 * service use-case - "set up XRay on shared hosting to see if I could, and it turns out it works quite well there"
 * portability - "it's a good baseline for portability of your own stuff too!" undefined

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.