We’re surprised at how often we come across websites on shared hosting solutions. To help people understand the risks, we’ve put forward 3 important reasons why shared hosting is not suitable for businesses. Whilst a shared hosting platform might be fine for amateur or hobbyist sites, we couldn’t stress strongly enough: if you’re serious about your digital marketing, do not use shared hosting!
- Security – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A vulnerability on one site with whom you’re sharing the server, poses a risk to your own website. Vulnerable sites on a shared server open the back door for hackers to attack everyone on the server.
- Performance – there is often no clear division of resources for sites on a shared hosting solution (as opposed to private hosting). If one site requires a hefty share of the resources it can easily choke the whole server and lower the performance levels for everyone.
- SEO – whilst there is much debate on this particular topic our experience has shown that hosting can have a significant affect on rankings in Google and other search engines. Not only is this from a performance perspective including uptime and speed but also any negative associations of a shared IP. The people who you share your sever with, of whom you have no control, could quite easily do something that negatively impacts a search engines view of the IP which is shared by each site on the server.
Hopefully, this information if enough to prompt people to question their current hosting solution and move to a more professional service. There are obviously many more factors than those we’ve listed and we’d recommend really doing your homework when it comes to choosing your hosting provider.
We’re always happy to answer any questions so let us know if you need some advice choosing the right partner.