Shared Hosting Problems
Unlike dedicated hosting, shared web hosting packages are commonly promoted nowadays to the tune of $6.95 per month with lots of goodies i.e. “unlimited features” thrown in. It is in fact an offer too good to miss when you are looking for hosting packages for personal web pages, social blogs or photos sharing etc. But if you are a business owner that owns money making websites, be aware of the risks associated with a shared hosting may inflict considerable damages and threats to your profitability – that’s when cheap dedicated hosting packages fits in to fill the gap.
Common “Shared Issues”
- When you are sharing your site in a shared host, you are in fact sharing your “residence” with a host of other unknown neighbor sites. It is typical of a shared web hosting server (Windows or Linux) to host about 300 – 500 sites per server. You are at the mercy of all those other websites. All it takes is some faulty application code in one of the neighboring site to bring the whole server to a crawl. Such programming bugs, like memory leaks issues, are often extremely hard to debug and isolate. Web hosting companies, in order to maintain their service level agreement (SLA) e.g. 99.9% uptime availability, sometimes are forced to cite maintenance reasons to bring the entire server offline for debugging.
- Marginalized bandwidth utilization. You may have been enticed by the “unlimited bandwidth” offered by the hosting plan. “Unlimited” here means your website can consume as much Internet network bandwidth for downloads and uploads. However, bandwidth allocation, throughput and utilization are not guaranteed. Being a shared platform, bandwidth allocation is also shared across all hosted sites, assuming on an equal basis. If any of the neighboring site gets a huge spike from social websites such as Digg, Mixx or Stumbleupon, your site bandwidth utilization may be marginalized. As a result, your website becomes unresponsive and irks surfers to leave your site immediately. Do not underrate social traffic; it may well overwhelm the entire server in a matter of minutes.
- In the case of shared hosting, do not expect full backup services from the web hosting company. They are only able to schedule a full system backup and very unlikely to entertain your request for site restoration. The onus of website backup is left to the responsibility of individual owners. Luckily, such backups can sometimes be automated if you are using cpanel hosting.
- Having a shared hosting means sharing everything, including your site IP address, which some may not think this is a big deal. However, it will be a big deal when that IP address is sanctioned by the web community as a spam site. This normally happens when a rogue neighbor site is being black listed by major search and email engines. All originating sites associated with that black listed IP address will suffer as a result i.e. having sent emails listed as spam mails. It is uncommon for spammers, hackers and blackhat SEOs to use shared hosting sites as experimental feeder sites to their main sites, which not surprisingly, are on dedicated and perhaps anonymous hosts.
In short, there are perils and risks to consider when choosing a shared hosting option. If you are a starting a web business with limited budget, web host sharing can be a perfect candidate. Choose a reputable hosting company for a start and grow your web business from there. The costs of a dedicated hosting are always the major considerations for site owners. But if you are operating a profitable website, then you should do some profit analysis and determine if the associated risks of shared hosting is a threat to your profits. We will discuss how you “measure” your website profitability in future posts.
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