For every business there should be a website in this modern age and whether it be a business owner or a developer the main question is where to host it? The most preferred solution is a Rs 99 Baby plans from our favorite hosting provider GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost etc. We all must have bought such a plan in our life if you have ever created a website for a small scale business. But the real question is “Is the Shared Hosting from these providers totally worth it?”
What’s the advantage of Shared Hosting by Major Hosting Providers?
Shared hosting is less expensive, considering the other hosting services like dedicated, VPS and Cloud Hosting. Another advantage is that most of them provide 24×7 customer service, though it might take some time to get a hold of them if you ever encounter a problem. These are easy to monitor and work with, considering their preinstalled cPanel and other software’s that our hosting providers give us to play with. One such software is a website builder or Site Builder(Software’s similar to WIX) for the user to easily design their websites according to the user’s idea of their website with predefined layouts. Some business owners have started to use these features to make their personal websites. Most of Shared Hosting providers also promise us a 99.9% up time too.
Is Something wrong with Shared hosting?
Nothing is too good to be true. This applies to shared hosting as well. Shared hosting really means a single physical server sharing its resources such as space, ram etc to multiple users. Since we are sharing the same server there are some problems as well. A spam website which is being hosted in similar IP can affect your website’s reputation. Also, if the visitation to a website using shared hosting gets a number of requests, then the other websites ,that are in the same physical server, gets really slow. Another issue is that, you spending Rs 99 per month for a website really worth it, considering there are many free hosting service providers such as Hostinger, 000webhost, Freehostingetc that we can use without paying anything and no credit card is needed to create an account. Freehosting.com even provides a cPanel for us to work with. I won’t recommend this for big loaded websites like a wooCommerce based sites but normal website would run with ease for small case businesses. If your business grows, I would suggest you change from this hosting. Considering developers main headache is that shared hosting does not provide root access and are limited to technologies that can be used. NodeJS cannot be directly installed to the server without a large procedure from the provider or without a workaround using nvm. And most of the shared hosting providers only provide PHP as they consist of 78.9 % of internet according to Wikipedia. This limits the developer on using the up-to-date wanted technologies without moving to a higher priced hosting service. Another issue unknown to many business owners but to some developers is the free website builder is a trap. These website builders force you to stay in their hosting service as it won’t be available for export. Anybody who has used WIX can relate to this. The website builder also creates a bloated and unclean code that is tough even for a developer to edit and update the website which gives a heavy migraine for them.
Conclusion
I personally would suggest that instead of spending an amount on hosting for a simple website, it would be best for the business owner and developer to host it in a free hosting service for cost-cutting purposes. Developers can even host any static websites with a custom domain in GitHub too. Many of the current website design as in the famous website, refer Awwwards a website that awards the best designed websites, have contact information without the contact forms which are perfect for hosting in Git.
I also believe that the Business owner or developer should move to a higher hosting plan such as Dedicated Server if the business blooms and the site gets heavy traffic or needs a high computational power for it to run. Shared hosting is mostly preferred for static websites for it to perform well.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.