Simply Junior

What Should You Watch Out For With Shared Hosting?

The most popular & cheapest form of web hosting is shared hosting not least of all because of its low cost.

However shared hosting does come with its fair share of perils.

Shared hosting means that your website will be hosted on the web host’s server that is also home to many other websites.

So, if each site or account on the server has its own allocated amount of web space & bandwidth how can it be bad, you may ask?

Well below are some of the Pitfalls of Shared Hosting.

3 Pitfalls of Shared Hosting

Some hosts will overload their servers with too many sites which impacts negatively on the performance of your site caused by increased competition for the server resources by all the sites on the server. This will slow your site down & could even cause a server to crash – disaster! Shared hosting accounts also have restrictions placed on them limitations placed on them with regard to the amount of disk space, data transfers, email addresses and domains that they can have. There are also often restrictions related to running scripts and databases that use quite a bit of CPU (processing power). This type of server activity causes reduced performance for all sites on the server which is beyond your control. Stability and Security of the server & consequently your website. A poorly managed server which hosts one or two exceptionally busy sites could exhaust the server’s resources and cause downtime for all sites hosted on the server. The same is true if one site on the server is subject to a DOS attack which can impact all sites on the server. Therefore any site on a shared server that is compromised, that security breach can pose a serious risk to all of the sites on that server.

Whilst the above scenarios are enough to put anyone off opting for a shared hosting account it’s not all doom and gloom.

Most of the above only occur on poorly managed servers where the hosting companies are short sighted & put profitability above service & customer loyalty.

It is therefore quite possible to secure a cheap hosting option on a shared seller with a reputable & well managed hosting company.

Welcome to 2010. Look around the states. Yes, they all have different perils for drivers to face. For some, it’s the weather with snow and ice making driving dangerous during winter. In others, it’s hurricanes and tornados. But leaving aside all the different types of peril, there’s one big problem for everyone with a vehicle on the road. All the major insurers are pressing for rate hikes. State Farm, Allstate and Geico have been leading the charge. And we are not just talking hikes of one or two percent. In Florida, for example, State Farm is raising rates by an average of 9.2%, while Allstate went for a shock-and-awe average of 16%. Even though the recession is slowly easing, the US is facing the highest levels of unemployment seen for decades. Rate increases like these hurt everyone struggling to make ends meet. Is this just gouging by the insurers? Like the Wall Street bankers, are they only interested in their bonuses? Should we think of insurance companies as the new carpetbaggers, using political influence to their own crooked ends? Just why are the insurers making such egregious demands for more money when most of us are down and out?

Lining up the questions like this gives little chance of answers favorable to the insurers. Does that make us biased? Hell, yes! Increases like this when the economy is on the bottom will only lead to more people driving without insurance. As more drop out of the legal framework, the premiums rise for the rest of us. The costs stay the same. They are just divided among fewer insured drivers. Worse, we now have to add additional uninsured and underinsured coverage. It costs more for those who want to stay legal on the road. Are there any justifications for these increases? Well, if you ask a talking-head for the insurance industry, the blame gets spread around. We start off with the rise in the cost of medical treatment. It seems the healthcare services have all been hiking their charges to treat those injured in traffic accidents. Evidence? Well, following very public contract disputes in California and Connecticut, we now have the stand-off between United Healthcare and Continuum Health Partners in New York. The hospitals want increases. The insurer is asking for cuts of between 7 and 10%. In these circumstances, the insurers are actually standing up for their policy holders. If healthcare costs can be reduced or held stable, premiums can also be stabilized.

The really big problem, however, is whether the insurers can pay all the claims we make. The insurers have low capital reserves. Why are the reserves so low? Well, it’s back to the recession. When the insurers collect in the premiums, the money is invested until it’s needed to pay out the claims. Just as our 401k investments have taken a big hit, the insurers suddenly found their investments had lost value. Now, the state Insurance Departments are insisting the capital be replaced. In some states, the insurers have agreed to reduce the number of people they insure. In the rest, the premiums are to rise. This means, no matter where you live, it’s going to be harder to find cheap auto insurance. Harder does not mean impossible. Using the search engine on this site, you can still find cheap car insurance, but you may have to look more carefully at the discounts on offer and accept a higher deductible. This may not all be the fault of the insurers, but it sure feels like it.