Twenty 7 and counting » Hosting

Hosting Series Part Two: The problem with shared hosting

David — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:58:13 +0000

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.

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Hosting Series Part One – Intro

David — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:08:11 +0000

The first thing anyone wishing to run a website of any sort needs is a web host, it would be nice if finding the right host was easy but it isn’t. You have shared accounts, premium shared accounts, VPS’s or dedicated servers. And within those groups you have many companies to choose from. What makes it more difficult is that not all hosts are created equal. The shared hosting market seems to be the most saturated and within it you will find the very good and the very bad. Over the years I have tried many different shared hosts and I personally don’t like any of them, my biggest gripe is performance. Now before I go into that let me say that you do get what you pay for, you should not expect the same level of performance on a $10 a month plan compared to a $200 a month dedicated server, it just ain’t gonna happen.

In order to find a solution to the poor performance of shared hosting I started to look at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. I tried several VPS hosts and so far the best overall for me has been MediaTemple and their DV accounts.

I currently have accounts with MediaTemple, Slicehost, Brightbox and SoftLayer, all have their pro’s and cons and I have each for slightly different reasons. Over this series I will post more info on each of the above and also expand on what is involved in hosting your account on a VPS or dedicated server.

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