When creating a website, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is what type of hosting you need for your site. One of the most popular choices for first-time website owners is “shared hosting”. Shared hosting is a type of low-cost option where you share space on a server with other sites. Shared hosting has been popular for the past 20 years and here lies the problem with it, shared hosting is no longer fit for purpose, imagine using a mobile phone from 20 years ago, in the year 2000 the first ever Smartphone was marketed (the Ericsson R380) this mobile was groundbreaking!
This “Smartphone” runs on an obsolete EPOC Operating system with a black and white (well green) LCD screen, it connected to the out of date WAP mobile technology and had extremely limited speed and memory systems. No apps, wifi, music, camera, fingerprint scanner, GPS etc etc. This phone is clearly out of date, using old technologies (such as WAP rather than WIFI) and does not provide the services we take for granted (Facebook, Twitter, Whatapp, Banking apps, etc)
In this post, we’ll talk you through your main hosting options, and ensure you are aware of the best plan for your requirements!
The challenges of Shared Hosting
Let’s be honest the web hosting market is pretty saturated. So shared hosting is not only cheap for the user but companies are able t0 over-allocate the servers they are running in order to get as many customers on each server and increase their ROI. Most shared servers have at least 50+ websites on them, and just as many virtual network interfaces/IPs. Each server’s IPs will also be hosting several sites. So if a web hosting plan simply enables you to rent space for your website on a server, shared hosting is the equivalent of cohabiting, or staying at a Hostel rather than a Hotel, you’ll have to share resources with other websites, which means your performance can suffer if those sites get a lot of traffic. Security can also be a major concern, although many Shared Hosting providers will offer additional protections.
Over the past 20 years, Webhosting companies have done well to ignore the challenges of shared hosting, concentrating on letting you know how it “should” work, and ignoring the downsides by cutting pricing and locking customers into odd 12 months contracts for shared hosting. Whilst your website gets hardly any traffic, shared hosting works (mostly – assuming that the other sites on your server aren’t using all the resources!) But once your site becomes more popular, and needs more resources, issue becomes apparent very quickly. Suddenly your site begins to show browser errors (400 and 500 errors for those who know HTML error codes) and then without any intervention they disappear…. your site suddenly takes 10 -20 seconds to load, sliders begin to stutter and forms fail.
The server you are on cannot cope so the Hosting companies’ watchdog script ( an automated script which kills off user processes ) kicks in to kill anything that is overloading the system resources. So suddenly the processes your site needs are being shut down with no warning – you thought your website was slick and now your visitors are experiencing real issues which are suddenly damaging your brand! Chron jobs are shut down so any auto processes regularly fail so your site becomes an ongoing, intermittent issue.
If Shared Hosting is Out of Date, What type of hosting is fit for purpose but will not break the bank?
For us at InstaHost, we completely overhauled our Hosting offerings once we fully appreciated how we could harness the power of the Cloud! So we did the right thing, we retired all of our out of date HDD Shared Servers, and completely rebuilt our platforms using state of the art technologies (rather than that from the 90’s) So we invested in 100% Solid State Drive (SSD) storage.
In an SSD, data is stored in microchips instead of magnetic disks, a hard disk drive (HDD) uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read information from the right location on a storage platter. This difference is what makes SSD so much faster than traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). SSDs are more expensive, but deliver a much-improved level of performance, draws less energy (allowing us to maintain our carbon zero status) and are less prone to failures. Obviously, as the data passes through the server’s processor faster, it means that it can be delivered to the user’s browser faster, so website pages load in less time.
We believe top grade hardware should be deployed 100%, which is why we invested in Samsung SM883 SSD’s in all of our datacentres and we have yet to experience any failures in live operation (touch wood!) to date.
In addition to this hardware investment, we developed systems to take advantage of the power of the cloud. We developed our advanced autoscaling and load balancing systems ensuring resources scale and balance automatically. Bandwidth, memory and processing power is scaled up or down instantly – depending on demand. If there’s a surge in traffic, your website will continue to offer the same fast experience for everyone. This is because a site isn’t hosted on one or two servers, instead, it can access the whole platform’s resources: multiple servers, and we always keep dedicated resources in reserve to cope with the unexpected! This is what makes a ‘true elastic cloud’ platform. Many other hosts use load balancing but use it in the more traditional way, as a way to mitigate failover: if a server goes down, your site is moved to another, so it stays online. Our balancing, of course, completes this vital role but we also deploy our advanced load balancing to respond to traffic load and balance it across multiple servers as needed. So with InstaHost, your site stays online, and remains fast, regardless of the load the servers are under.
Will this work for the worlds favourite CMS: WordPress?
The short answer is YES, but with 75,000,000 websites, or 27% of the Internet (including 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World) currently using WordPress across the globe, we wanted to go that step further to support its use for our clients, so we built our own WordPress Platform!
IOur WordPress platform is optimised for the complete needs of a WordPress website. We set out to build a platform, based on our cloud platform, but tweaked to deliver the performance and security needs of sites built using the CMS and to also get access to platform-specific features such as pre-installed sites, automatic, managed WordPress updates, and dedicated WordPress support.
Conclusion
Your web hosting plan is one of the most important elements to consider when building a new site or increasing traffic to an existing site. One of the first decisions to be made is whether to opt for basic shared hosting, cloud hosting or (if you’re deploying a WordPress site) a WordPress-specific platform.
Shared hosting remains popular with smaller websites and blogs, mainly due to it’s low cost. Cloud Hosting is the new cool kid on the block, delivering so much more speed and stability than shared hosting, and offers fantastic value for money, in fact at InstaHost our Cloud Hosting is priced at the same price as most shared hosting packages. Obviously, if you are utilising WordPress for your website, a dedicated and purpose-built platform delivering a highly optimised, lightning fast and highly secure site, is definitely the way to go!
