Web Hosting

Of course, there are downsides. All the websites from all of the accounts are all competing for the same scarce computer resources. The servers that hold shared hosting plan sites are much larger and more powerful than your home computer, so they can host hundred of websites without any problem — as long as none of the sites are too popular or need too many resources. 

Every page load, every image and asset file, requires a little bit of attention from the web server when someone requests it. If you are running a complex web application or a content management system, this could require more than a trivial amount of processor power to query a database, assemble content into a page, or take some other action. Individually, these things can be so fast as to seem instantaneous. But multiplied over hundreds or thousands of visitors in a few minutes, and you have a recipe for site crashing. If the popular site is someone else’s on the same server, you’ll experience performance lags and downtime without ever knowing why. If you are the lucky one getting a lot of traffic, you can expect your site to become unavailable right when you most need to shine. Additionally, you may find yourself running afoul of your hosting company’s unstated but very much in-force limitations on usage and bandwidth.

The other downside to shared hosting is the inability to customize the hosting environment. This might not make any difference to you. If you are just running a straightforward WordPress blog (for example), you can get by just fine without having to tweak your environment. 

Another problem to note about shared hosting is that it can open your website up to a certain amount of risk. No matter how careful you are in securing your web applications, other people might leave their software vulnerable to attack and provide an entry point for attacks that affect your site as well. Also, you share the same IP address with other sites on the same server. If one of them is using their account to send spam email, or is engaging in other bad behavior, you may find your sites being blocked by email filters and content firewalls. The worst part about this problem is that you might not even know it’s happening.