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Why Shared Hosting is a Sin

When you’re looking for cheap website hosting, it is important to remember that your site is an important business asset and deserves to be treated as such. That’s why it is often surprising to find out that many businesses decide to choose shared hosting for their website. Your website earns you money and for many businesses, is an essential tool and yet most businesses spend a lot less on their hosting than they do on their mobile phone contract!

Shared hosting is definitely something that we discourage, especially if you have an online shop or online directory. Shared hosting is a sin and there’s a number of good reasons why.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is when your website is placed on the same hosting server as other websites, often thousands of them! It is generally cheap hosting (starting at £2/month), although we’ve seen shared hosting packages go up to around £28/month. Popular shared hosting providers include Godaddy, IONOS, TSO Host, 123-Reg and thousands of others.

The drawbacks of Shared Hosting

It might be more affordable for people launching their first website but there’s a lot of drawbacks when running your site using this kind of hosting and it really is a false economy.

Speed

When you share your hosting with thousands of other sites, that means you are sharing the same server resources. If a site on the same server suddenly receives a lot of website traffic, that can affect the CPU, Ram, etc and in turn affect the speed of your website. Shared hosting is often slow regardless of traffic due to the providers trying to cram in as many websites as possible.

Reliability

Similarly to the issue with speed, because you’re sharing the same CPU with other websites, having your site on shared hosting can result in further risks of website downtime. It also means if there is an issue on the server, all sites will be affected, which can be problematic if you’re hosted with 1,000 sites on the same server. TSO Host seems to be the worst cuplrit for this recently. While they used to be a great value host with “decent” speeds, their service has been slow in recent years and a recent audit demonstrated a 98.17% uptime. That means your site will be down for a whopping 1 week of the year!

Shared with high-risk sites

The reality of using shared hosting is that you don’t know which other sites are being hosted with your own. Many of these sites could be high-risk and permeable to viruses and hacking, which in turn will put your site at risk too. You may even be hosting your site on the same server as a hacker!

Shared with DIYers

People that have fumbled through building their own website often don’t upgrade their site, which can leave it open to all sorts of performance and security issues. This can result in websites being hacked or getting a virus. Sharing your server with them is definitely not a good idea.

No dedicated IP address

Now this is a big one. Being on the same hosting server, you share your IP address with all the other websites. If one of those sites gets the IP address banned by an internet service provider, or API provider then your site will be banned too.

Not scale-able

If you plan to grow your website in the future, for instance to a larger ecommerce one, then you may find yourself limited by the server resources. This means that shared hosting would be totally inappropriate for growing your online presence. The site would need migrating to a proper hosting package and often there are migration costs to consider. It’s much better to be on a platform that will grow with you.

What is the alternative?

Your website is your shop window so it’s important that people can see it. That’s why we offer dedicated, cloud, or VPS (Virtual Private Server) website hosting through our partners at Fasthosts and IONOS at a highly discounted rate. If your budget is big enough, then a dedicated server is the best, but don’t forget to factor in maintenance into your monthly cost. If your budget doesn’t stretch that high, then a Cloud/VPS package with IONOS is a great compromise. If you’d like to save even more on your hosting, check out our hosting packages.

From only £6 per month, which is nothing compared to the cost of your mobile contract, a VPS hosting package is a small price to pay.

Andrew W "Hamelin"

Named after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Andrew is a master of communication. He can construct expert blogs and clever social media campaigns.

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