Is It Time To Move On From Shared Hosting?

Often, shared web hosting is a simple and cost-effective way of getting your website live. A shared service does what it says on the tin: several websites use one server simultaneously, to be administered by the host themselves. Some website creators do not like the level of control lost through this, but it is cheaper than the alternatives of dedicated hosting where no other sites share the bandwidth. A third option is VPS (Virtual Private Server), discussed below.

Security On Shared Web Hosting

Secured hosting also confers a level of security such as firewalls and server security applications and programs, while using a dedicated server will mean that the security measures stop with you. Monthly traffic, email accounts and disk spaces and databases are limited, and performance resources such as RAM and CPU are on a shared basis – hence the cheaper costs.

Why Move Out Of Shared Web Hosting

When talking about shared hosting, perhaps some clients will see the title as an illogical way of framing the question – the better question is ‘why would anyone want to move on from shared hosting?’ Simply put, if shared hosting allows you to deal with the actual physical content of your site (such as producing marvelous copy or listing products or uploading great videos), rather than some of the more technical aspects, then surely that is to be encouraged? If the site bandwidth sharing is not leading to technical problems, then what’s the problem?

Pitfalls Of Shared Web Hosting

Well, there are some disadvantages of relying on shared hosting. If the server runs into problems, then any site utilising it might fail to work. The lack of bandwidth might mean that larger sites (or those that feel they might one day need to expand) may find a dedicated host more preferable, for both performance and space reasons. If you have the technical knowledge to maintain your site and a wish to set specific security levels, dedicated hosting will almost certainly be preferable.

Risk Of Getting Blacklisted

Also, some site owners have complained that their domain might be blacklisted if it shares a server with another site that becomes blacklisted – guilt by association. As an example, Sitepoint posted this complaint from someone whose site was blacklisted, because another site had repeatedly sent out spam email to multiple sites. The IP address was blocked due to this, and other sites on the shared server were punished.

If your site grows rapidly then it may become inevitable to move on to VPS servers, which are a halfway house between shared and dedicated. In effect, the server is shared but efficiently segregated to allow greater control; Hostpapa uses the analogy of tenants living in a shared home, and sharing each others utilities, but being unaware of each other’s presence – in effect, the resources are shared but certain portions can be distributed to users as and when they need them. A further choice could be a cloud server, which takes the VPS and distributes it across multiple servers. In conclusion, it’s tempting to go cheap in the early stages of your site and plump for a shared host – but if you have any hope of growing your site, it might be time to move on.