Shared Hosting and Who Else Is On It

How it works

One physical machine runs many websites. Each has its own space and its own settings, and all of them draw on the same processor, memory and connection.

How many is never advertised. It varies between hosts at the same price by a factor of several, which is most of the difference between a good cheap host and a bad one.

The arrangement exists because a small business site uses a tiny fraction of a machine. Dividing one server among many customers is what makes hosting cost less than a phone plan.

Why it is usually the right choice

Worth saying clearly, because the risks below can read as an argument against it.

For a brochure site, a small shop, or anything with modest traffic, shared hosting is appropriate and the alternatives are worse value.

A virtual server costs several times more and assumes somebody administers it. Left unmanaged, it is less secure and less reliable than good shared hosting, not more.

The businesses that move up a tier and regret it are usually the ones who moved because of a problem that was never about the tier.

The noisy neighbour

The most cited risk and the most survivable.

Another site on your machine gets a surge of traffic, runs something heavy, or is badly built. It consumes more than its share and everything else on the machine slows down.

Good hosts limit this so no single account can starve the others. Poor hosts do not, and the symptom is a site that is fast most of the time and unaccountably slow on some afternoons.

What makes it hard to diagnose is that nothing about your site has changed. You will look at your own pages, your own images, your own plugins, and find nothing.

The shared address

Less discussed and occasionally more damaging.

Sites on a shared machine usually share an address. If another site on that address sends spam or gets compromised, the address can end up on a blocklist.

The consequence for you is email that stops being delivered, or a site that some networks refuse to load. Neither has anything to do with your own conduct.

It is uncommon, it resolves, and it is a genuine argument for keeping email somewhere separate from the website. Then a hosting reputation problem cannot take your enquiries with it.

The limits you meet without warning

The third risk, and the one that catches growing businesses.

Behind the word unlimited sit real limits on processes, memory and database activity. Cross them and the response is usually not a warning. It is errors for visitors, at your busiest moment.

The pattern is predictable: a business runs a promotion, traffic triples, and the site fails at exactly the point the traffic was worth something.

Asking what the limits actually are, before you need them, is the preventable version of this.

How to tell whether it is you or the machine

1. Test speed at several times of day, including evenings and weekends.
2. Compare a heavy page against a nearly empty one. If both are slow, it is the machine.
3. Check whether the delay is before anything arrives or during loading.
4. Ask the host directly what the server load looks like.
5. Test the same site elsewhere, which is the definitive answer.

The second is the quickest useful test. A near-empty page that still takes seconds to begin responding is not a site problem.

A worked example

A bakery whose site was fine on weekday mornings and slow on Saturdays.

Saturday is when people search for a bakery, so the owner assumed the site was struggling under its own traffic. It was not; the numbers were modest.

The host confirmed the machine was heavily loaded at weekends. Another customer on the same server ran an events site whose traffic peaked exactly when the bakery's did.

Two businesses with no connection, competing for the same processor at the same hours.

Moving to a different plan with the same host solved it. The cost difference was a few dollars a month, against a slow site during the only hours that mattered.

When to move up a tier

The honest signals rather than the ones a sales page gives you.

Sustained traffic that the host has flagged. Repeated resource limit errors. A shop taking real orders, where an outage costs money directly. Or a site that has been measurably slow across several tests and a change of host did not fix it.

What is not a signal: a slow site with no diagnosis, a general feeling that you have outgrown it, or a sales call suggesting you have.

Most small businesses never need to move, and the ones who do usually know why.

What you can do without moving

Before treating the tier as the problem, there is usually room in your own site.

Images are the largest single cost on most small business sites, and resizing them before upload frequently halves the work the server has to do.

Caching turns pages that are built on every request into files that are simply sent, which removes most of the load. On shared hosting this is the single most effective change available.

Removing plugins and scripts nobody uses helps, because each one runs whether or not it does anything visible.

A site doing those three things sits comfortably on shared hosting at traffic levels that would otherwise seem to require an upgrade. It is worth trying the free fixes before paying for a bigger machine.

Choosing a shared host well

Since the tier is right, the choice within it is what matters.

Look for published resource limits rather than unlimited. A host prepared to tell you the numbers is a host that has sized its machines deliberately.

Ask about the ratio of accounts per server. Many will not answer; the ones that do are usually the ones with a defensible number.

Check that backups exist, that you can restore them yourself, and that there is somewhere to test changes before they go live.

And read the renewal price, because the second year is where the actual cost lives, as covered in what web hosting actually buys you.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.