Suppose you want to host a site or a blog, ten best come up in your search, all offering unlimited or almost unlimited storage and bandwidth! You frantically look for reviews and find lots of positive reviews that are really mostly SEO driven affiliate links pretending to be impartial. Let me help you in your decision. All the top ten hosts in the various lists suck. Their commodity business model is for people to get frustrated with one host and move to another equally bad. So they just swap discouraged customers. But let’s understand the unlimitedness of the offering. Here what they don’t tell you:
- All shared hosts have a cap on RAM usage, usually 100 -150 MB (your computer has a 1,000 MB RAM at least). This means that when you site exceeds this limit, automatic scrip will shut you down. If you have a database driven site, than 50 – 100 simultaneous calls (visitors) on your site will probably exceed your RAM allocation. Just when you are lucky enough to get a precious incoming link, the host will shut the door in front of your visitors or customers.
- All shared hosts cap your CPU usage. Once again if you have a spike in your processing load you site will be terminated. This is for the good of the people, your invisible neighbors.
People think they got a great deal with unlimited everything when in fact web hosts deliberately hide the really important constrains on CPU and RAM.
You probably can get away with the CPU and RAM limitations if you host a static web site like blogger or a static web page. But with any dynamic web site like WordPress, meaning the site is database driven and pages are generated dynamically, you will run into the brick wall quickly. Note that even though your host is shared, your data doesn’t actually reside on one computer. There are DNS web address, email servers, database servers, OS servers, etc., all trying to play in unison and deliver your pages in seconds. Each of the connections is the inevitable weak link and it actually takes time for a host to get all the combinations right, especially with the persistent need for hardware upgrades.
A shared host is like moving into an apartment building. Sooner or later one of you neighbors will keep you awake with an overnight party, or bathroom upstairs will leak. At least in an apartment building you know who the offender is, on a shared host you totally blind and totally at the mercy of the admins. About the admins, ask yourself what person with a minimal tech skill will work in tech support today? Their job is to misleadingly blame everything on your own system configuration and if they can delay your rage by couple of hours, mission accomplished. They know it’s a hassle to move a web site and this is the single most important factor keeping them in business.
I want to refrain from specific recommendations but a good rule of thumb is to stay away from any web host that costs $10 or less per month. Happy hosting!
