Is your blog hosted on a shared server such as BlueHost, Dreamhost, or whatever? Then you might be in for some surprises later down the road if you ever get more than 500 visitors per day. You can check how many websites are hosted on your shared server by entering your domain name at myIPneighbors.com.
I bet you though if you are on a hosted server, you will most likely find at least 10 other websites. Yes, this is bad.
When I first started blogging, I also started on a cheap $100/year hosting from bluehost.com. No shared hosting will ever be as good as a dedicated server so if you are serious about making money blogging or handling massive traffic, you should get a dedicated server.
I remember Zedomax got digged, bluehost went down like that! and never came back up until I transferred everything to a dedicated server.
But then, amazing thing happened after switching to a dedicated server. Since your website runs faster and doesn’t ever go down (unless you got digged AND stumbled again at the same time…), Google indexes your site faster and you get more search results on Google. It’s common sense that if your site has uptime of 99.9%, Google-bots and other search engine bots will crawl the site more faster.
Sometimes, I find that search engine robots are the ones gobbling up most of your bandwidth. You can always edit your robots.txt file and not let them crawl, but then you lose SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and eventually get no traffic from major search engines.
Here’s a summary of Zedomax traffic ever since its beginning in August 14th, 2006:
As you can see, well, as you can’t see also, I’ve upgraded my server numerous times due to diggs, stumbles, DOS (Denial of Service) hacker attacks, and whenever I made a new site.
You should really pay attention to how much traffic will be coming to your blog everyday to make sure your web hosting service can handle it.
Believe me, I tried these following shared hosts and they were all terrible when it came to traffic more than 500 per day:
BlueHost – The most reliable of the shared hosting I’ve tried.
DreamHost – They give you SSH2 access which is good but again, they host WAY too many websites on their servers. Result? I paid $100 for a year of hosting that I never used because my site kept going down. DreamHost is worst because they lock your site automatically when you exceed the maximum allowed bandwidth. Bluehost is much nicer in my opinion as they don’t have that system. Don’t fall into their “green” marketing scheme, when it comes to your website, you want it done right.
Lunarpages – Similar to BlueHost
I’ve tried many other ones for my previous job at Comfile, but I won’t list them all here, they all really suck in my opinion.
So, what is the best dedicated hosting?
Well, I’ve only tried 2 so far.
Aplus.net – These guys are pretty reliable until one day they had some type of packet-loss problem and ALL my 20 or so websites were down for more than 5 days!!! The funny thing was, Aplus.net itself was fine, it’s just all their customer’s servers were down. They put themselves in front of their customers. That was the end of doing business with them.
That’s when I moved everything to Cari.Net, which I already had couple sites running on. The most annoying thing is that Aplus.net seems to have customer service centers overseas. Not that I have anything against saving Aplus.net’s money, but when you are in America, you want to talk to someone in America, and want to get things done fast. Another thing about Aplus.net is that they are way too big a company now that they don’t care about little guys. All they are about is making money and who pays them more. This is an honest review of my experience with them and I am not being bitter about it, it’s the truth.
Cari.net – Right now, I am running all sites on Cari.net due to their reliability through my actual experience. I will probably try other hosting later down the road or even run my own servers but Cari.net is also priced much better than most hosting companies out there.
In my opinion, you should stick with a small to medium sized dedicated hosting company that cares about you. You want a simple host that you can call anytime anywhere without knowing your stupid registration number or get man-handled by stupid receptionists who redirect you 3 times before you get the dedicated support team.
Another thing you should think about is that the hosting company should only provide “dedicated hosting”. If they provide both, you are probably going to run into bunch of bs such as the company not providing enough support for dedicated server customers.
In all, I did learn a lot about Linux, servers, scripts, and everything you need to know about running a website through various server upgrades. If I didn’t do that, I’d probably have to pay a lot of money right now just to make new websites.
So, if you are going to make more than 1 website, get 1 dedicated server and bunch of dedicated IP addresses.
13 Responses to Is your blog hosted on a shared server? You are not serious then.
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Thanks a lot for sharing your hosting experience! Always I was looking for a good, reliable hosting company.
But, regard DH. I have many websites there on the on single account and I have more than 5000 visitors/day/all websites and its run well, no problems at all.
sometime is slow, sometimes are down (for short time) but I’m till now I’m satisfy by DreamHost.
Anyway, I’m looking for a dedicate servers hosting company and your experience is good to know.
PS: stay away of Netfirms! First I was hosting at Netfirms and was a NIGHTMARE!
I suppose I really have to disagree with you about the apparent limitations of shared hosting. Maybe this was something that you “personally” experienced, but I can guarantee that the shared hosting I’ve used has been able to handle a lot more that 500 to 1000 uniques per day.
The major disagreement I have with you is about Dreamhost. I’ve been using them for the past two years for shared hosting, and plan on staying with them, because I’ve had no problems at all. You say “DreamHost is worst because they lock your site automatically when you exceed the maximum allowed bandwidth”… hard to imagine that you reached the maximum allowed bandwidth when they allow you 50TB and Bluehost only allows 15TB.
There’s been times, in the past, when I had a site with over 5000 uniques per day, most of them sucking down about 25Mb, each with no problems at all. Honestly, I think it’s less about your hosting provider and more about your configuration.
I had a bad experience with SurpassHosting.com, myself, but that doesn’t mean that other high traffic sites have had the same experience.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us Tom. I believe that the case must be the same with everyone, if there’s one bad experience, that’s not providing equal support for Dreamhosts’ customers or whoever it is. I am still not convinced. Although there is a “monthly” bandwidth limit, that’s not the problem with Dreamhost, they also have hidden “daily” bandwidth.
If you don’t believe me, try clicking on your website about 5000 times in a row and you will see your server go down or at least slow down a lot. That shouldn’t happen.
Anyways, thanks again for sharing the info, we like discussing this topic, don’t we?
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Hey Max Great post…..Have you ever tried Godaddy hosting? I am currently using them and your post got me thinking what will happen when I get over the 500 mark a day which looks like it is coming quick..
Shaun
I know a friend who is on Godaddy.com. I guess they are okay if you are on their dedicated but any shared servers will have some serious down problems with more traffic I guess.
Hey Max Great post…..Have you ever tried Godaddy hosting? I am currently using them and your post got me thinking what will happen when I get over the 500 mark a day which looks like it is coming quick..
Shaun
I know a friend who is on Godaddy.com. I guess they are okay if you are on their dedicated but any shared servers will have some serious down problems with more traffic I guess.
Great post … i really like it. i will read your all post henceforth. Its true that we need dedicated hosted server, i am using such hosted server from onthenetoffice and am happy with the service. FYI – http://www.onthenetoffice.com/virtual_office.html
Great post … i really like it. i will read your all post henceforth. Its true that we need dedicated hosted server, i am using such hosted server from onthenetoffice and am happy with the service. FYI – http://www.onthenetoffice.com/virtual_office.html
I think it vastly depends on the *quality* of the shared host. I’ve had bad (Netfirms!) and excellent (1&1) shared webhosting experiences. I currently remain with 1&1 and host 5 sites myself on my single account, and I’m sure I’m sharing the same server with more then a handful of other websites as well.
I routinely monitor ping times throughout the day with a website monitoring widget and rarely see any major slowdowns, typically only at night when I’m share backup and maintenance scripts are running, and even then the sites remain responsive even if it’s clear that there is some background load going on.
My blog is probably the least trafficked of all my sites, but I do have a small phpBB forum which probably gets 500 pageloads on a slow day and upwards of 1000-1500 on a busy day, and even with all my other sites and sharing it with who knows how many others, I have zero issues even during peak daytime hours.
I’d like to say “You get what you pay for”, but 1&1 has disproved that for me in this situation as their shared hosting is very inexpensive and has proven very reliable in the 2-3 years I’ve been a customer.
FWIW, I just discovered that there is 44 other websites on my server.
I guess that goes to show you that well managed, shared can work.
Well, that is exactly the problem, the moment one of those sites you don’t run get marked spam or gets “digged”, everyone else goes down too. It’s not the 99 times it’s running fine, it’s that 1 time it goes down. Just my 2 cents.