The dangers of budget, shared hosting

By Joe Gardiner Friday, 26th August 2011

There are plenty of web hosting companies offering low cost shared hosting that has continued to get cheaper over recent years. Cheap web hosting is particularly prevalent in the US where bandwidth is much cheaper than the UK and Europe.

Shared hosting is the most profitable way of offering a hosting service, as lots of customers can be hosted on a single physical server. However there are numerous drawbacks to choosing a shared web host purely based on price. Before choosing your web host consider that a cheaper provider may end up costing you more in terms of time as well as money.

There are plenty of horror stories across the web of one man band, cheap, shared web hosting providers who suffer down time in the tens of hours even though they offer a 99.*% SLA. Having said that, there is nothing necessarily bad about a one man band service, just don’t expect 24X7 support or instant responses to your support issues.

More commonly it’s the small and low cost hosting companies which tend to be the subject of online horror stories, but many large web hosting companies have also become the subjects of such reviews. We’ve had our share of teething problems in CatN, but one of the reasons we have been able to respond quickly and develop is the size of our team, the retained expertise, and the investment available for new equipment and training. These are commonly only found in a larger company with a strong trading history.

What should you be aware of before signing up with a shared hosting provider?

1. How many people work for them?

This may seem obvious, but it is very easy to portray a larger company size than is actually the case with a glossy website full of stock images. Investigate parts of the site such as the blog to see if more than one person is writing there. You can apply the same practice to other forms of media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Another indication is the companies use of support forums or apps such as Get Satisfaction. Generally these service can only really be used by companies with more than one person as they are often time consuming to maintain. Of course, you could always just ask the size of their personnel.

2. How is their platform designed?

Platform design is important when considering any hosting company and can vary depending on your requirements. However a common design for smaller, budget companies is to use single servers for all services, i.e. web, app and DB. These servers are then provided to customers as a hosting solution in the standard way, often with web signups to create accounts.

This can cause two problems. Firstly, different services require different levels and types of hardware capacity. On a single server the majority of resources may be used for the database reducing performance overall for other services and other customers. This results in under utilised capacity in areas such as CPU and can damage the return on the companies CAPEX for the server, weakening the web host financially.

Secondly, the platform may have redundancy in areas such as power or transit, but the physical hardware itself offer no redundancy. If that single server fails, not only does your site go down, but everyone else’s too. It is very difficult to seamlessly scale the available resources to a customers website in this setup. In order to increase capacity the server must be taken offline and hardware must be upgraded.

The solution is to combine sustainable hardware CAPEX, with intelligent system / platform design that enables sustainable investment to continue. Without expertise and funding, it is extremely difficult to achieve this. A provider who has built scalability into their platform is providing a fundamentally different service to the old, single server style web hosting that some unscrupulous providers still use.

3. Is it really ‘Unlimited’?

An extremely common selling point with the budget web hosts is to offer unlimited data transfer, unlimited storage, unlimited sites. This may sound extremely attractive to the majority of people, but if you dig a little deeper in Terms and Conditions, or an SLA, unlimited can suddenly become very limited indeed.

Unlimited hosting doesn’t actually mean a free for all on resources. In fact hosting companies will oversell their server space, as they know that most customers only use a fraction of their disk space and bandwidth. The problem is that this relies on other users having small sites and not spiking. In a world of social media a single article can cause traffic to spike on a website and can adversely affect neighbours in an oversold environment.

The important factor when signing up for any online service is to check the small print, but this is especially important when you’re being offered something labelled as Unlimited. Equally consider, how important is it that you website remains live? You could end up spending more time resolving an issue than you would have done reading the small print!

As difficult as it may now sound choosing a web hosting company, there are a few key points to remember. Trust the community of users out there in forums and discussion groups! The chances are someone else has used a specific web host before you, so do your research, read review sites and take part in forum discussions. The majority of users are friendly and will happily recommend a web host to you.

Finally, engage with hosting companies. A good web hosting company will offer advice and consultation, and if they’re especially good they won’t even need to push for the hard sale!

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