Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

January 16, 2012

Top Reasons to Ditch Shared Hosting

In our time as industry analysts, we’ve seen a heck of a lot of bologna out there. Namely, we’ve seen a lot of web hosting providers making unbelievable claims that no one in their right mind could believe, nor want the consequences of. More specifically—if we’re to stop beating around the bush—we’ve had just about enough of shared web hosting in our daily lives. In fact, we’re so tired of seeing our friends, clients, and coworkers shafted by the various unprofessional claims and services touted by industry leading companies, that we felt it was time to step-up, and create this public service announcement. So for the last time: If you’re using traditional, shared web hosting,there are reasons to consider an upgrade. If you’re still clinging to that web hosting provider though, we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is. With that in mind, you can check below beyond the break to see our full and un-edited reasons to leave shared hosting in the cold for something just plain better. Starting, of course, with:

The Performance Can be Terrible:

To back ourselves up, we have not tried personally and used on a daily basis every single hosting provider that offers some form of shared hosting. That being said, we’ve used a heck of a lot of companies in our time, and we’ve had enough experiences to get a general feel for the way things work. And, typically, they can tend to work sluggish. In fact, we have yet to find a shared hosting experience that doesn’t occasionally leave our server space lagged-out, unusable, or potentially gone from the map. Nothing infuriates us more than finding out a client couldn’t find our services because of an absent web page: Not even yet another Dick Clark New Years Eve can make us this angry. But in case you’re feeling a bit of bias here, let’s present the facts.

1.  You’re Sharing Room and Board with Other Energy Hogs: Firstly, with a shared web hosting set-up, you’re essentially bunking up with potentially thousands of other users, relying on their needs to not soak up all of the bandwidth or disk space so you in turn can do exactly that. It’s a maddeningly strange system, in which a serve is split into hundreds of miniature pieces, and then expected to run at maximum performance, granting you industry competitive power and lag. To be honest, it just can’t happen, or at least not in the volume and magnitude that other methods of hosting can provide. Granted, we can’t rightly blame the hosting provider for this, as the system itself is at fault. But no matter how you slice it, shared hosting is an inevitable compromise of your site’s performance favor of a cut in budget.

2.  Optimization is Out of the Picture: Secondly, it’s very unlikely that your shared hosting provider will allow you the kind of root access needed to fully tweak-out your server, maximizing its performance for the software you’re running. In fact, because you’re essentially living in only a doorframe of a much larger house (shared by thousands of other doorframe sitters) you have little to no control over the house itself. As such, you have no ability to maximize the infrastructure, repaint the walls, or raise the roof slightly to meet your needs. To put things short, the server cannot run at its maximum unless you are at the helm.

Security? What Security (Reliability)?

Another notch in the armor shared web hosting is sporting is its near often lack of security. Let’s think about it this way: We’ll use that house metaphor from earlier, only instead of just a doorframe, let’s re-imagine shared web hosting as an experience in which thousands of people are all living in one giant house together, like the world’s largest commune. As such, you have your own room, in which you can do just about anything you want, save strip the walls and rebuild the frame. However, what’s to keep the person in the next room over from punching a hole in the drywall, peeping directly into your personal bubble? In computer terms, it’s no less difficult for someone nearby to hack into the shell of your server space, and potentially wreck or steal your data. In fact, they don’t even have to be nearby! Anyone on the server could potentially serve up the other users as one giant security risk, rendering shared web hosting one of the most insecure systems we have ever seen.

And on the subject of reliability, we feel the concept is best visualized—again—using that house metaphor. Let’s say your neighbor does something incredibly stupid, like smoke in bed. If the mattress starts to burn, and the whole room goes, there’s a fair likelihood your space is up in smoke as well. In much the same way, a nearby denizen on the shared server could potentially do something to the root of the server itself, and if the oops is oops-ish enough, you and everyone else tied to the server experiences a black-out. This means your site is gone, at least until the web hosting provider can crack open the sever’s shell and correct the damage caused. This kind of unprotected security risk is a real gamble with your sites’ reliability. Worst of all, the way shared hosting is arranged simply doesn’t allow for much else. Again, it’s the system—not the hosting provider—that’s at fault here.

Is it Really That Cheap?

We do understand the need to meet budgets. But when a comprehensive and powerful virtual private server is available for only slightly more than a traditional shared host, isn’t the additional security and performance worth the additional bucks? Even if you’re not ready for a pricy dedicated server, there’s no reason in the world to compromise your Web presence and livelihood by choosing shared hosting.

Tags: bandwidth,  disk space,  Shared Hosting,  virtual private server,  web hosting,  software,  system,  dedicated server,  dedicated,  cheap,  shared,  server,  budget,  virtual,  Cheap Web Hosting,  best hosting,  cheap hosting,  shared server,  cheap web host,  dedicated hosting,  hosting server,  server security,  choosing a web host,  reliability,  web host,  security,  web hosting security,  personal site,  cheap host,  making money,  power system,  cheap hosting provider,  dedicated server hosting,  budget web hosting,  shared web hosting,  shared host,  web server,  web hosting providers,  server space,  Helm,  cheap hosting services,  cheap web hosting companies,  server performance,  up time,  dedicated web hosting,  virtual hosting,  web hosting companies,  web hosting provider,  choosing web host,  web hosting service,  hosting security,  web hosting services,  web host provider,  web hosting industry,  web hosting terms,  IT hosting,  budget hosting,  IT,  web presence,  root access,  web site security,  security software,  client server systems,  new server,  hosting upgrade,  IT security,  IT infrastructure,  virtual world,  shared bandwidth,  shared server security,  shared space,  security systems,  web hosting infrastructure,  security system,  compromise web host security,  new web host,  private,  starting a web host,  private server,  hosting reliability,  server needs,  clients,  shared hosting providers,  web hosting clients,  security risk,  as space,  powerful hosting,  private web server,  private dedicated web server,  bandwidth use,  dedicated web server,  hosting provider,  private hosting,  hosting budget,  virtual dedicated server,  shared hosting security,  dedicated host,  web host security,  choosing hosting,  steal bandwidth,  cheap web hosting services,  private dedicated server