Shared hosting is the most popular type of web hosting. But that doesn’t mean it is a flawless hosting plan and can be used by everyone. In fact its shortcomings should not be called as drawbacks because they are part of its features. Shared web hosting is designed for a particular segment of websites with unique needs. It is the best plan for these sites but becomes obsolete when these websites grow out of their leagues.
Here we will elaborate some of the main cons of shared web hosting services. These flaws should help you determine if this is the league to which your site belongs.
Security Concerns
When your website is hosted on a shared server, there are so many other sites with which you will be sharing the space and other resources. Therefore, you will always be facing security issues. Share servers are highly likely to be attached by hackers. Even if there is a malicious activity in any part of the server, it is going to affect all the websites on that server. So your website will be sailing a ship with many others and if any of them digs a hole, all the websites will go down together.
Performance Issues
Typically, the web host will assign a maximum limit to each account on a server. If you cross that, for example the bandwidth limit, you will be stealing the resources from other accounts. So if multiple websites on the server experience an increase in traffic, your website is going to suffer from lack of resources. This can easily translate into performance issues such as poor load time and response delays.
Many web hosts sell their shared hosting plans so cheap because they crowd hundreds or thousands of websites on the same server. All the resources like the drive, RAM and CPU are shared by all these sites. You could only imagine how your site’s performance is going to get affected by the demands made by other sites on these resources.
Software Restrictions
When your website is hosted on a shared server, you are limited by the software and applications offered by the host. You don’t have any authority to install a software of your choice. Whether it is the operating system or the security software, you are bound by the limitations laid down by the web host. It is the shared host that decides what software packages that will be used which can be very prohibitive when growing and expanding a website.
Shared hosting is a good choice if you are just starting out on the internet and have a small website that does not receive a high volume of traffic. However, there will be a time where you will need more server resources and flexibility so you will need to upgrade to VPS or Dedicated server so you no longer suffer slow page loading times, throttling or server downtime.
Customer Support Limitations
Shared hosting comes with a certain level of customer support. But someone using a VPS or dedicated server is going to get advanced level of technical and priority support. So there is a good chance that your website could be down for minutes or even hours until the technical support gets around to resolve the issue.
Thus, there are several limitations to shared hosting despite the fact that it is used by the largest percentage of websites. As mentioned earlier, these drawbacks can be seen as flaws only in cases where the needs of your website have exceeded the offerings of shared hosting. Yet there are certain limitations to shared hosting, which are not present in dedicated or VPS hosting.
When choosing a host don’t get fooled by price, huge amount of storage, libraries or lots of features…look for reviews and then make up your mind.
What’s your experience? We would love to hear your feedback.
1 Comment
The fact that shared hosting is so weak or vulnerable when it comes to potential hacker attacks should scare most people away from them and yet so many website are on shared hosts. I guess people are just not well informed about the dangers this type of hosting has. I just don’t understand who would want to host their site on such a server knowing that if just one of the other sites hosted on that server has problems it can easily cause ALL the other websites on the server to have issues as well!