Why Shared Hosting Is not Good For Business

Why Shared Hosting Kills Business

Virtualization came into being with hardware technology advancements and the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL).

Shared web hosting, or virtual web hosting, stores many websites on a single server. Using the virtualization technique, many instances of the same operating system are installed on a single server, with each OS getting its own unique IP address.

It’s offered at phenomenally cheap rates because maintenance costs are shared among many users. However, because of certain limitations, it’s really appropriate for hosting small websites only, and should never host a site that generates the traffic and resources that commercial websites generate.

Shared Hosting Problems

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Though these operating systems have their own control panel, the server on which they sit is limited to just one administration panel. And since all installed operating systems share the same hardware resources, they put a huge burden on a server’s main components: hard drives, processor, ram, and more. Not even the highest hardware configuration can speed up a server facing these types of burdens, ultimately slowing down web performance.

The Server Is Busy and Other Errors

When a person visits a web page stored on any server, the server has to search its hard disk for that page’s data. When a visitor requests a page from a separate website on the same server, s/he has to wait for the hard drive to finish fetching the previous page before s/he can access the next one.

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The server "is busy", or on another track at that moment, and you get the same issues with processor and ram consumption regardless of advertised "unlimited disk space and bandwidth." This is what can contribute to those pesky error messages we’re all too familiar with:

503 Service Unavailable
Failed DNS Lookup
Network Connection Refused by the Server

Shared Hosting Security Issues

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If that weren’t bad enough, websites hosted on shared servers are most vulnerable to attacks as well. Knowledgeable hackers can easily access files belonging to websites on a shared server because the majority of these websites don’t support SSL/TLS (https) technology.

Say No to Sharing

If you can rent dedicated web hosting, by all means, do it! The cost of dedicated web hosting has significantly reduced over the last few years — comparable to early 1995 – 2000 hosting fees (that’s about $75 – $100 for all you young’uns out there).

Just be sure not to confuse a dedicated IP service with a dedicated hosting service. The two are not the same. A dedicated IP service simply gives you a static IP address, and it does nothing to prevent the errors above or prevent the problems of slowed web performance. Current events can be found in our Shared Web Hosting News section.