Known issues with shared hosting.

Hosting your websites on a shared account, like Hostgator, is a great way to start out. The shared platform offers great value for money, and offers most of the features that even a dedicated package can give you, but there is one major drawback, your neighbors.

Imagine in an apartment block, and you all use the same hot water, every time you go to have a shower, someone in apartment 28 is running the tub, another in apartment 65 is using the washing machine, and you are at the top of the block, waiting for the hot water feed. This is the same situation that people find with bandwidth, and server resources when using shared hosing.

Some web scripts are extremely resource hungry, and can run, almost permanently, to the detriment of all the other websites on the server. Your page may appear to load quickly when you view your site, but a couple of seconds later, the load times could increase 500%, and you would be completely unaware of this.

There is also the spam complaint scenario. Imagine someone in your apartments making crank telephone calls, the feds are trying to pinpoint the source, and they have narrowed the search down to your block, but cannot yet pinpoint the true source. What happens then? You are then monitored, along with all your neighbors, all because of one crank.

Your sites IP address.

Each server has an IP address, like 123.456.123.44, this is the identifier of your server, and your website can be found at this address, but so can everybody else with that same IP, and there could easily be 10’s of thousands.

When a spam complaint is received, the authorities take this matter seriously, and they inform several services about this spam breach. Many services then take action to punish the spammer, and the easiest way to limit their actions is to ban the IP address, your site gets targeted by association.

The same thing can happen by others on your server hosting viruses, hosting illegal files, or simply posting immoral content.

Can your website afford to be exposed to this kind of risk?

If your site is just a family page, or a welcoming blog, then it shouldn’t make any difference, but if you are involved in any form of e-commerce, or have an email list of contacts, the there may be trouble ahead using a shared hosting account.

The alternatives are often more expensive, were you would need to go for a full dedicated server, with your own SSL certificate, but the more cost concious among you should take a look at VectorLevel, where your account is automatically assigned a unique IP address, giving virtual shared hosting, for the price of shared hosting.