What Should You Watch Out For With Shared Hosting?
The most popular & cheapest form of web hosting is shared hosting not least of all because of its low cost.
However shared hosting does come with its fair share of perils.
Shared hosting means that your website will be hosted on the web host's server that is also home to many other websites.
So, if each site or account on the server has its own allocated amount of web space & bandwidth how can it be bad, you may ask?
Well below are some of the Pitfalls of Shared Hosting.
3 Pitfalls of Shared Hosting
Some hosts will overload their servers with too many sites which impacts negatively on the performance of your site caused by increased competition for the server resources by all the sites on the server. This will slow your site down & could even cause a server to crash - disaster!
Shared hosting accounts also have restrictions placed on them limitations placed on them with regard to the amount of disk space, data transfers, email addresses and domains that they can have. There are also often restrictions related to running scripts and databases that use quite a bit of CPU (processing power). This type of server activity causes reduced performance for all sites on the server which is beyond your control.
Stability and Security of the server & consequently your website.
A poorly managed server which hosts one or two exceptionally busy sites could exhaust the server's resources and cause downtime for all sites hosted on the server. The same is true if one site on the server is subject to a DOS attack which can impact all sites on the server. Therefore any site on a shared server that is compromised, that security breach can pose a serious risk to all of the sites on that server.
Whilst the above scenarios are enough to put anyone off opting for a shared hosting account it's not all doom and gloom.
Most of the above only occur on poorly managed servers where the hosting companies are short sighted & put profitability above service & customer loyalty.
It is therefore quite possible to secure a cheap hosting option on a shared seller with a reputable & well managed hosting company.
