Shared web hosting services have many great advantages, the most important one being that they made it an affordable affair for almost anyone, including small businesses, to own and run websites.
Although big players in the business world usually prefer to go for dedicated servers, shared web hosting should never be seen as the poor man’s choice for hosting sites.
That having been said, businesses that are looking to host their sites on shared hosting servers should be aware of the pitfalls that they might encounter or the downright disadvantages that come with that decision.
These disadvantages include (but are not limited to):
Share Resources: shared hosting means a website must share all its server’s resources with other neighboring websites. Hard disk, bandwidth, CPU and RAM – everything – is apportioned by the hosting providers depending on the clients’ selected packages.
But, as hard as they may try to keep things fair, there will always be overuse by the more popular sites with heavy visitor traffic. They often hog resources and that usually negatively affects the performance of all the other sites on the server.
Therefore, businesses that have their sites on shared servers might encounter reduced page load and performance speeds through no fault of their own.
No Server Access: a shared web hosting server has to cater to the hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that it is home to. Therefore, no single website owner can dedicate the terms or conditions in which it is run, and neither can the sites’ owners take it upon themselves to configure it as they wish.
This means when it comes to shared web hosting, clients get little to no access to the servers. And this in turn means that it is critical that their websites conform to all the servers’ requirements instead of it being the other way around.
That could hurt or limit the sites’ performances because the servers could totally prevent them from running certain apps or scripts as they aren’t configured to handle them or simply due to the reason that the hosting providers don’t want them running on their servers.
Increased Security Risks: the security of a shared web hosting server is only as strong as the security of the individual websites on it.
Any website on the server with susceptible scripts running on it can, and actually will, be discovered and taken advantage of by hackers or malware. Once a single site has been compromised, it is relatively easy to take over the whole server or to simply crash it.
Businesses that depend on their websites for their services will find the constant crashing and service-interruptions more than a mere annoyance when they see they are losing visitor traffic and customers.
Being Blacklisted While Innocent: while hosting providers take extra care to make sure all of their clients abide by their terms and conditions on rare occasions rogue website owners do take advantage of a lapse in scrutiny.
Before they are caught and shut down, they could use their sites to send out spam, share or sell illegal stuff or even phish for data.
Once they are identified as being harmful or illegal, the websites’ IP addresses are usually blacklisted by search engines, and antivirus and antimalware programs register them in their databases.
Now, once the IPs have been blocked, and even if the hosting providers have shut the sites down, it can be a while before they are unblocked and deemed as safe and secure again. In the mean time, other websites on the server (and hence with the same IP address) will also be hit severely, resulting in loss of traffic – something that is not good for business.
Limited Growth Capabilities: one important thing that makes shared web hosting affordable is the fact that numerous websites share the bill for the upkeep of the servers.
Hence, being businesses themselves hosting providers too try to limit their features and perks to keep them as few and minimal as possible. Unless the competitive market demands it, they would rather not add features that will cost them extra. It is only after their competitors make better offers that they are usually forced to offer better service.
If the hosting provider already has decent and up to date features, it will be fine – for a little while, at least. But as technology is constantly evolving, they and their clients stand the risk of being left behind. This could be a detriment to a business that strives to keep up with the times.
It could also harm the business’ online customer service as visitors won’t be able to access the latest technology which could make for a less than perfect user experience.
Therefore, businesses that have outgrown their shared hosting providers or those that have seen a rise in traffic (or even a deterioration of their site’s performance) should make an immediate switch to a better package – or better yet, move to another hosting provider.
If it comes to it, opting for a dedicated server should also be taken into consideration – especially if the business’ can afford it.
