Asko P. Research for my new project: what are some cons and pros you've found with shared hosting providers?

Martijn A pro, like @ancarda has mentioned, is that I should not need to know (or care) about server configurations. Firewalls should be in place, caching should be a toggle, that sort of thing. A con is that more and more packages assume easy access to package managers for installing things. I need SSH access if I want to install things through composer, bower, etc. Very few shared hosting providers offer me that. (Mine does.)

Mark Dain Main pro can be the hands-off approach; the hosting provider takes care of updates, security, support and all the things you don't want to have the hassle of dealing with. Resources are enough for what you need and a lot support more than just Apache/PHP nowadays. Main con is the fact hosting providers never update software, don't patch for security holes and they all have dreadful support. Worst of all, you're often limited to something stupid like PHP 5.2. If you write your website in anything else, you'll need a VPS/similar to host it without going insane.