Web Hosting: Choose Wisely

Your choice of web hosting provider can be vital to the success or failure or your online venture. There are a few considerations to take into account before signing-up, and we’ve tried to cover them in this post.

So don’t go with the first and cheapest option you find, choose wisely, or you’ll end up like this guy…

The options:
With shared hosting, many different clients will be allocated space on one server, sharing the IP address, RAM and processing power.

On a VPS, powerful server hardware is virtualised into a small number of virtual servers, each with its own allocation of RAM, processing capability and IP address.

With a dedicated server, you get the powerful server hardware all to yourself and usually will be allocated as many IP addresses as you require, so long as you can justify the need for them (you may have to pay a small additional fee for larger blocks).

The problems with shared hosting:
Whilst shared hosting is invariably the cheapest option, there are significant downsides that make it a poor choice for business.

Bad neighbourhood – you have no control over the kinds of sites that share your server and your IP address, this poses two risks. Firstly, if an insecure website on the same server is compromised by hackers, your site can suffer downtime, or even be compromised also. Because the quality and safety of your site can be affected by sites on the same IP (your IP neighbourhood) search engines tend to take this into account when ranking your site. A website on a bad IP neighbourhood (e.g. which shares a server and IP with malware sites) will not rank as well as it would on a unique IP.

Overselling – When designing shared hosting packages, one decides how much disc space and data transfer to allocate to each client, and sell the packages with these values. Say the host offers 20GB of disc space and 10GB data transfer for each client on a server that has 200GB of space available and a total data transfer limit of 100GB a month. In order to ensure that each client has access to the resources they have been promised in the sales pitch the hosting company can put a maximum of 10 clients on the server.

The hosting company notices that the clients on their server only actually use 10% of their allocated resources, just 2GB of space and 1Gb of data transfer. If all the clients stay at this level, they can put a total of 100 clients on the server before maxing it out.

The problem occurs when the clients want to use the allocation they’re paying for, the server is then overloaded and you get lots of downtime.

Unfortunately overselling is all too common in the shared hosting industry and it’s often difficult to get an answer from potential providers as to whether they oversell or not.

Dedicated vs Virtual:
Because of the risks inherent in shared hosting, we always recommend businesses (and intensive private users) use either a dedicated or virtual private server.

If your site is resource intensive you’re probably going to be better off with a dedicated server; if you’re on a budget then a VPS may suit you nicely. A good hosting company will be able to guide you to the right platform for your needs and budget, as well as offer a choice of fully managed support packages for those who don’t have a sysadmin on staff.

Our choice:
If you’re looking for a UK hosting company, we’d always recommend the very clever people at Memset for dedicated servers and VPS. Their customer service is impeccable, as born out by all the awards they keep winning.

In the US, we’ve found SoftLayer‘s dedicated machines to be reliable and their staff very knowledgeable.