Shared hosting is the first choice for many individuals and small business owners. In fact, most of the sites you run across thrive off this type of platform. While there are many benefits to such a solution, there are disadvantages you need to be aware of as well.
System Crashes – Im gonna give you the cold hard facts – although you can find yourself a respectable provider, the reliability of shared hosting will always be questionable. Even with proactive measures such as loading balancing, placing thousands of websites on a single server makes the machine susceptible to failure.
Performance Issues – Performance can also be an issue. Lets say youre experiencing moderate traffic while Joe Blow who is sharing the server with you gets a sudden burst of traffic. A neighborhoods traffic can have a direct impact on your site, causing it to lag with pages that take forever to load. Weve all experienced it so you know that slow web pages are a real drag.
Security – Security is another critical element that isnt guaranteed in a shared hosting environment. Web hosting companies provide customers with a lot of power these days – way too much if you ask me. All it takes is one amateur webmaster to misuse .htaccess or another sensitive component and stir up all kinds of chaos on the server. If youre not as proficient as once thought with development languages, your PHP-based web applications can be left insecure, providing intruders with a gateway to your data. Then there is always the threat of sharing server space with a hacker looking to compromising unknowing users like yourself. The worst part of all, you might not have a clue whats going on until its too late.
This is not a knock on shared hosting, just a warning. The mere structure of this environment makes it vulnerable under a wide range of conditions. The good is thing is that with a little research, you can find yourself a reliable company with the knowledge and technology to ensure as few issues as possible.