Posted on May 10th, 2011Shared hosting is usually the first type of hosting that webmasters purchase when beginning their online endeavors, primarily because it is cheap, abundant, and easy to use. However, with this simplicity and affordability comes decreased performance. As is the case with most other industries – price typically equates to quality. Although it is clear that shared hosting is not as powerful as VPS, dedicated, or reseller hosting, many people don’t quite understand why. In the following paragraphs we’ll reveal why shared hosting is less reliable than other hosting types.
Increased Server Loads
In the shared hosting environment a single web server is utilized by hundreds of webmasters simultaneously, and this configuration can only be sustained through advanced load-balancing technology, in which server requests are prioritized and then handled accordingly. However, when a large number of requests are sent to the server at a single point in time, or a massive amount of bandwidth is consumed, the performance of every site on the server can suffer significantly. In fact, websites that operate within the shared hosting environment statistically experience more downtime and slower loading pages than those hosted in any other hosting environment. To sum it up – shared servers are simply overburdened on a frequent basis.
A Demand That Cannot Be Fulfilled
Every day there are dozens, if not hundreds, of aspiring webmasters born into the Internet industry, and 90% of them will choose a shared hosting plan to begin their endeavors. This incessantly overwhelming demand has caused even some of the most powerful hosting providers to become overburdened with new customers in the last couple of years. To accommodate the needs of an expanding client base hosting companies have to continuously perform server maintenance and develop new load-balancing technologies, and to ensure reasonable performance they have to keep a relatively equal amount of hosting plans allocated to each server. So, as their client bases expand, the performance of their servers suffers, until new servers are purchased and added to the network. This constant overwhelming expansion is the primary cause of decreased performance within the shared hosting environment.
Group Security Issues
For a webmaster using a dedicated hosting plan, as long as they take the necessary precautions to secure their personal computer and websites, the performance of the server will remain unaffected by security lapses related to other servers offered by their hosting provider. However, with a shared hosting plan, any security lapses (i.e. – distributed denial of service attacks) automatically affect every website on the server. This dramatically increases the statistical probability of experiencing downtime due to security issues, as the security of all of the sites on the server is shared, as are the server resources. In other words, if a hacker has a vendetta against a single webmaster that is utilizing a shared hosting plan, and attacks their Web server, the performance of every other website on the server will be instantly affected, regardless of whether the sites are related or not.