How shared hosting can destroy your online business
While shared hosting may seem like an attractive budget-friendly option, it can silently sabotage the success of your business. A slow-loading website can reduce customer satisfaction by 16%, pushing potential customers straight into the arms of your competitors.
Quality web hosting is not just about keeping your website online; it’s about ensuring optimal performance, robust security and a seamless user experience. When your business shares server resources with potentially hundreds of other websites, you may encounter a host of problems, ranging from unpredictable downtimes to security issues and slow loading speeds.
Let’s take a look at all the reasons why shared hosting is a bad idea for online businesses, and what you should get instead.
What is web hosting?
Hosting is an integral service for every webmaster, experienced or not. You essentially rent server space and system resources to build and power various web projects. Plus, because you’re sharing the server with many other users, everyone also splits the cost, making the service a great first step if you’re on a budget.
When you start, many people choose shared hosting as the most affordable solution with enough features to meet the needs of a simple website. That’s actually not a big surprise, since most sites can easily fit on a small account in terms of space.
But if you run a business, you want to build and maintain a flawless brand image. Because shared hosting comes with some inherent problems, it is rarely the most optimal solution for businesses, at least not in the long term.
Now let’s discuss some of the ways shared hosting can destroy your business.
1. Bad neighbors and overselling
Shared hosting users often suffer from two common effects of shared hosting: bad neighbors and overselling of servers.
When you choose such a service, your account gets a certain amount of CPU power, RAM, disk space, bandwidth, etc. The problem is that these resources are not constant.
Every client that lands on the same server uses the same set of system resources as you do. If another user starts using much more CPU and RAM than previously allocated, all other accounts will slow down.
Now imagine not only sharing the same server with just 5-10 people, but with over 100 performance issues and standstill are around the corner. The process of filling a server with as many users as it can handle is called overselling and is very common among shared hosting providers these days.
2. Share your system resources
If you look at the typical shared hosting architecture, this immediately presents problems.
You have a server that, even with heavy optimizations, has some limitations. Hosting providers are like banks. They rely on the idea that even if you put 100 projects on the same server, their needs can be easily met under normal circumstances. That’s true to some extent, as most client websites are quite lightweight.
But what happens outside of normal circumstances?
Suppose a user decides to run a marketing promotion and gets a sudden influx of new visitors. The same thing happens with another website on the same server, which becomes more popular after a successful advertising campaign. Even these two are enough to cause serious problems for a hundred other websites, even though their projects maintained the same resource demand.
Shared hosting and great performance just don’t match…
3. Limited room for growth
As we mentioned, starting with shared services is suitable for almost any new project. However, every successful entrepreneur knows that you always have to make plans for the future. So what fits today may be far from perfect once you start to get traction.
Sure, you can find different shared plans with different capacity and resource allocations, but even the most powerful ones often prove insufficient for businesses with moderate to high traffic.
4. Restrictive adjustment control
Since client accounts in a shared environment are not truly isolated from each other, server adjustments are very difficult. Even the smallest change will affect all users on the same server. Therefore, root access on shared accounts is prohibited.
When you find yourself reaching a certain limit, you should contact the support team to check if they can increase it. Unfortunately, such limits are usually predetermined and set by the host, so raising the bar would often require an upgrade to a different hosting plan.
5. Impact on cybersecurity
Another underlying problem with shared servers has to do with the extent of security measures you can take. Cyber attacks are becoming more and more persistent and causing all kinds of problems for webmasters.
Say you’re prepared for this. You have taken all known measures and secured your website down to the last detail. But hey, you still have your neighbors. Many people still neglect their own security, exposing the entire server to various vulnerabilities. A breach of a neighboring account is just as good as gaining access to your own online premises.
Shared hosting alternatives worth exploring
So what can we do about it? What else is there besides shared hosting?
VPS hosting – Virtual private server (VPS) solutions solve many of the integral problems associated with shared hosting. All accounts are in an isolated environment and receive their assigned share of resources. The services are also often highly scalable, allowing you to adapt resources to your current consumption.
Then you have the customization aspect. Unmanaged virtual server solutions give you full root access, so you can customize even the smallest details of your account and website.
Naturally, some hosts do VPS services better than others. Companies like it ScalaHosting include tailor-made management and security solutions for each customer, making the deals more cost-effective than ever.
Application-based hosting – If you want to use specific software to build your website, you can go a different route. Some hosts offer app-optimized packages for users of different CMS solutions, such as WordPress, Joomla or Magento. Such accounts are specifically optimized for the smooth performance and enhanced security of a particular software.
App-based hosting is not necessarily a different type of service, as it can use shared, VPS and dedicated services.
Dedicated servers – this move may be a bit overkill for new businesses, especially considering the huge price increase of shared hosting. Still, some businesses are growing by leaps and bounds, so an upgrade to a dedicated server isn’t unheard of.
Just as their name suggests, dedicated services give you full control over an entire physical server, allowing you to make it work the way you want. There are no other clients to disrupt your performance and virtually no limits to your customization freedom.
Business web hosting is worth the upgrade
In summary, there is nothing wrong with choosing shared hosting for your first online experience. The service is quite user-friendly, offers enough features for starters and only costs a few dollars per month.
But while hosting issues aren’t as critical when hosting personal projects, putting up with subpar performance and security on a commercial website can easily ruin a business. Upgrading sooner or later may be your only option.
