• What type of hosting best suits you?
• Shared hosting – (Most common and cost effective hosting solution)
• Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS) -
• Dedicated hosting service
• Managed hosting service
• Reseller web hosting
• Wikipedia’s definition of web hosting

Here are the 10 alternate uses of wordPress other than blogs.

1. Online Shop
   
   You can set up your own eCommerce site with WordPress. There are many plugins and themes that you can use to accomplish this. For example look at the plugins like WP e-Commerce, Cart66, eShop, Cf Shopping Cart ect.
2. Article Directory 
   
   By using WordPress article directory plugin or themes you can turn WordPress to a fully featured article directory.
3. Auction Site
   
   You can set up your own auction site like eBay and let viewers bid on your items. WP Auctions, Prospress
4. Membership Site
   Create a fully functional membership site with flexible membership levels and options. Control your member’s access to downloads, online content, videos, forums, support and more. Free and paid membership plugins are available for WordPress.
   
5. Job Board and Forum
   There are several plugins that you can use to create a forum and a job board.
   
6. FAQ portal or Q&A site
   Create a Q&A site and let your online community to share knowledge.There are many Q and A / FAQ Plugins are available.
7. Classified Site
   
   There are many classified Plugin/themes for WordPress.
8. Gallery and Video Portal
   
   You can create online photo gallery and video portal using wordpress. Many paid and free photography WordPress themes and  video portal WordPress themes are available.
9. Review Site
   WP Customer Reviews allows your customers and visitors to leave reviews or testimonials of your services.
10. Project / Time Management
    WordPress can be used as a project management system. It is customizable with themes and plugins, to create your own project management site.

Pros:

• Cost effective hosting solution. Since server is shared, cost per user comes down
• For a newbie to web hosting, this is the best option to get started. You can setup a basic website using shared hosting.
• Shared hosting customers need not bother about server upgrades and server maintenance. These routine tasks are  done by server administrators who work for the hosting company.

Cons:

• Since web server is shared, if one site in that shared web server is consuming lot of memory or other resources, performance of other sites also can  be affected.
• You may have limited disk space and bandwidth.
• While you can install many common and popular web applications easily(E.g: WordPress, Joomla etc),   you cannot install any software you wish.  Since it is a shared server, if your hosting company thinks that a web application or software can be dangerous to it’s shared hosting environment, it may not let you install that software. Also, you don’t have admin access to the server, as in the case of a dedicated server.

That said, for most of common users who need a simple basic website or a wordpress blog or even a shopping cart system with database features or for a web developer who needs good developer -rich features, a shared hosting account is more than enough.  This is most common type of hosting account and is the most sold hosting type.

 
You may also want to read other types of hosting.

• What is Web hosting?
• What is Managed hosting?
• What is Dedicated hosting?
• What is Reseller web hosting?
• What is Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS)?

Suggested reading:

• Shared hosting
• Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS)
• Dedicated hosting service
• Managed hosting service
• Reseller web hosting

Suggested reading:

• Shared hosting
• Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS)
• Dedicated hosting service
• Managed hosting service
• Reseller web hosting

Suggested reading:

• Shared hosting
• Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS)
• Dedicated hosting service
• Managed hosting service
• Reseller web hosting

Also you do not need top notch technical skills to be a reseller.  For your customers, you provide direct support. But at same time you do have technical help and support from your parent hosting company (from whom you purchased the reseller hosting package).  Hosting related technical issues can be resolved with help of support from this parent company.

Reseller hosting is very lucrative and there are many successsful hosting companies out there, who in reality are successful resellers. Many  entrepreneurs choose to  start a branded company this way. Reseller hosting packages so cheap, it is very easy to setup a reseller hosting package overnight, literally!

Also web design agencies or web developers who have many customers under them opt to buy a reseller hosting account, as this lets them create hosting packages and billing setup for their customers.

Suggested reading:

• Shared hosting
• Virtual Dedicated Server(VPS)
• Dedicated hosting service
• Managed hosting service
• Reseller web hosting

1. Minishowcase

   Minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX that allows you to easily show your images online, without complex databases or coding. Just upload a folder full of images to your galleries folder and you have a new gallery ready. Thumbnail will be created automatically and images can be viewed with a convenient integrated thumbnail menu.Your hosting server must have at least php and GD/GD2 installed.

2. Photo Gallery with MooTools

   A tutorial showing how to combine many of MooTools’s functions to create a nice photo gallery.

3. Photo Slider

   
   A simple image slide show. One disadvantage is that you need to create thumbnails images and full view images.

4. (E)2 Photo Gallery

   
   (E)2 Photo Gallery is a open source gallery built with Mootools Javascript Library. You to upload your photos to a desired folder, then tell the (E)2 Photo Gallery the folder name and it will automatically load the images using PHP. Main features includes: Thumbnail Viewer, Hide/Show Thumbnails, Automatic Adjustment to Image Sizes, Image Uploader, Four Design Viewer Options.

5. jQuery SlideViewer

   slideViewer is a jQuery plug-in which allows to instantly create an image gallery from an unordered list of images (HTML). slideViewer checks for the number of images within your list, and dynamically creates a set of links to command (slide) you pictures. slideViewer automatically checks the size of the images and renders accordingly.

6. Slider Gallery

   
   Slider Gallery is created using the JQuery slider.

7. FrogJS

   
   FrogJS is a simple javascript gallery. With a basic understanding of HTML and you should have your FrogJS gallery up in no time. All you have to do is upload your images and frogjs files and then add some html codes to your web page.

8. Auto Generating Gallery

   The title describes everything – Create a beautiful photo gallery by simply dumping your photos in a directory.

9. TripTracker

   
   TripTracker is a customizable, free JavaScript image viewer control with an animated slide show feature. You can add captions, dates, and bylines to photos. You can create multiple slide shows in one page. You can easily customize the viewer’s appearance or the slide show animation.

10. xImgGallery – Javascript Image Gallery & Slideshow

    A simple script and easy to implements Javascript image gallery and slideshow.

11. Highslide JS

    
    Highslide JS is a quick and elegant looking gallery viewer written in JavaScript. You can use the visual Highslide Editor to set up your Highslide installation without writing code.There are some third party sites like Joomla, Drupal, wordpress, phbb, DotNetNuke, Magento, zencart, Picasa and more are offering plug-ins and other implementations of Highslide into their systems.

12. Imago

    
    Imago is a simple, easy to use ajax Image Gallery. It doesn’t use any flash or server side scripting. But it just uses the plain Javascript and CSS to show your pictures.

13. ImageGal

    
    Imagegal is a simple PHP script that will automatically create a JS/CSS/DHTML powered image gallery for you when dropped into a directory containing images.

14. Galleria

    
    Galleria is a JavaScript image gallery framework built on top of the jQuery library.It is free to use.

15. GreyBox

    
    GreyBox is a tiny JavaScript-based tool that allows you to add gallery feature using just a few easy-to-understand lines of code. It is easy to setup, easy to use and can easily alter the style as through CSS. GreyBox can be used to display websites, images and other content in a beautiful way.

16. Ajax Photo Gallery

    AgileGallery is a free AJAX photo gallery that rips through the XML output from Picasa and generates DHTML for the paging and thumbnails and displays the full sized photos along with any description entered in Picasa. AgileGallery uses AJAX to load and parse the Picasa XML file for the photo and thumbnail displays.