I mentioned in my previous posts that I am not a fan of shared hosting. Now don’t get me wrong it does have its place. Unfortunately my OCD like desire to have the best finds issues with it. My biggest gripes are around flexibility and performance.
Let me start with performance. In a typical shared host you can easily have 100+ customers on one server (that number is probably conservative). That one server is probably running the web server, database server, mail server, control panel and perhaps an application server. All of these take up server resources. In that scenario all it takes is some poorly written code or someone to be Dugg to bring the server to a screeching halt, taking down your site.
If you visit the support forums of any of the major players you will see many complaints over the performance of their sites.
My second gripe is flexibility. This is improving but only just. Trying to host a Ruby on Rails application shows what I mean. Although it is becoming more common for hosts to allow you to deploy RoR applications you are often limited to small applications only. You may not be able to use Mongrel and if you can you probably won’t have enough memory to run a cluster. You may also struggle to use Capistrano.
As I have said shared hosts do have their place. They offer an affordable way to host your website or blog but at the cost of performance and flexibility.
Leave a Reply