The Problem with Shared Hosting

Date: Feb 20, 2006
Title: Dedicated Hosting v. Shared Hosting
Comments: 0
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Why you should stay away from shared hosting

Fed up with your shared hosting and looking for a more reliable solution? A dedicated server through Cari.net is your answer.

Like many web designers, I started out making simple, static sites for small clients. The only hosting option I knew of was the always affordable shared hosting. Over the years I was with numerous providers and always ended up moving, constantly searching for a better host. (Yes, sometimes I was kicked off, though never for good reasons ;)

The Problems with Shared Hosting

Shared hosting, like AOL email addresses, are fine for non-critical purposes. However, like AOL email, shared hosting should never be used when you rely on your website to make a living. Why?

Don’t trust your neighbors. When your website is one of hundreds sharing a single server and/or a single IP, the potential for disaster is ever present. Almost every shared hosting experience I’ve had has been plagued by email issues resulting from some spammer paying the $7/month to hop on the server I’m sharing, send out 1,000s of unsolicited emails, and get the entire server blacklisted with all the reputable blacklists. So, I’m left with non-functional email addresses for days, while the host tries to clear the server from the blacklists. Fine if you’re hosting something for your personal needs, but unacceptable if you rely on your email communication to make money.
Unannounced Changes = Unexplained Downtime. One of the most aggravating shared hosting experiences I’ve had was when my shared host applied sweeping changes to the way they managed/allowed subdomains. They applied the changes a few servers at a time, taking down any and every subdomain that their customers had set up in the process. The kicker, though, is that they denied making any changes until 5 weeks after the first changes were made. It was clear to 1,000s of their customers that the host had broken the subdomains, and that the host should fix them. The host, however, didn’t even acknowledge a problem. Again, this is fine if your site is for personal use, but having a business-critical subdomain just up and disappear overnight is absolutely unacceptable.
Unannounced security patches can be undesirable security patches. Similar to the above, shared hosts are constantly applying security patches, and almost never announcing them (either before or after). While security patches are necessary, having somebody else apply them without your knowledge can be disastrous, especially for large or complicated dynamic sites. Content Management Systems, for example, often rely on very specific PHP commands or permissions, and often have known issues with certain versions of necessary software. If your sites are functioning fine with the current version of PHP or MySQL and there are no known security holes, upgrading can result in headaches that you just don’t have time for. When you upgrade your system yourself, you can research in advance and ensure that the upgrade goes smoothly. Otherwise, with shared hosting, you’ll wake up to downed site with no idea what happened.

So, where does that leave you? For business-critical hosting applications, dedicated hosting on a dedicated server is the only way to go. Not experienced with Linux? Order your server with Plesk 7.5 reloaded for easy management, backups, and upgrading. For extra security and redundancy, get your server behind a hardware firewall and purchase managed backups or a SATA RAID array.