I want to explore some of the reasons I’m not a fan of traditional “shared” hosting plans offered by most providers these days. Most people look at shared plans as being cost-effective. However, I find their overwhelming vulnerability and inflexibility a major risk, making you pay more down the line.
Performance
One of the universal drawbacks to shared hosting is the meager, and more importantly, inconsistent performance they display. On a shared hosting plan, multiple websites are using the same resources (processor cores, RAM, etc.) to serve their content to users. This means that if one site is having a spike in traffic or caught serving a poorly optimized resource, all the other sites on the server will experience performance drops. And the fact is that most owners with shared hosting don’t have any clue of what other sites are being hosting on the same box. So they are unable to trace the problem to it’s source. Which leads to the next point…
Security
Sites hosted on shared plans are susceptible to attacks from their neighboring sites. Those traffic spikes mentioned earlier can sometimes be intentional attacks meant to drive down the performance of other sites likes yours. Not to mention that the security flaws in your neighbor’s websites become your security flaws as well. An infected website can easily become an infected server. And sometimes the attacks aren’t instigated from the outside but by the neighbors themselves. Hackers have been known to purchase shared hosting plans just to easily gain access to the hosting network and launch attacks from within.
So what do you suggest?
Here at Zero Daedalus we place top priority on your system security and performance. So rather than shared hosting, we offer private servers (VPS and dedicated) to ensure that your websites delivers consistent performance regardless of what other people are doing and protect you from other people’s shenanigans.
Need a website? Looking to upgrade an old website? Get a free consult and we can have you up and running within 24 hours.