Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you still using shared hosting for anything?

50 pointsmattbgates52 comments

While there is plenty of cheap alternatives for your VPS or Cloud server, I'm curious for those who are using shared hosting, if at all, what are you using it for?

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I wrote an article about this called Shared Hosting is Bad for Business. I pointed out that shared hosting as a business model depends on the failure of it's customers' websites. You can't run 1,000 high traffic websites on a single server, typically, but you can run 1,000 no-traffic websites on a single server.

You see this in practice because basically every shared hosting provider will disable your account if your website starts using more than it's quota of system resources.

Some providers go so far as to say their service is unlimited but obviously that's false, there are several physical limitations no matter what hardware is being utilized.

Don't many businesses have 'no-traffic' websites?

A typical local business website probably gets a few hundred hits a day, which is pretty much nothing.

And it does not mean that the website is a failure.

I used to work at DreamHost, and what you're saying is not true (for us). While it's true that the shared hosting business model only works because most people buy the service and don't use it, we did not disable popular websites. I remember some customers actually getting semi-dedicated servers at no extra cost because that's what it took to keep their site online.

Your presumption of "significant traffic is the only sign of success" is laughable. Many, many real world small businesses have limited capacity bound by real world resources and they can have a booming business by a few thousand hits a day. It is exactly these small businesses that need shared hosting to keep the costs low but still be visible. In other words, if I need a carpenter in a small town, and google townname carpenter, it needs to come up but just how many orders can said carpenter take at the same time?

I worked for a company that provides shared hosting, and I don't agree with the "relies on failure". Shared hosting isn't for high-traffic websites - it is cheap hosting for low traffic websites, so the whole premise is wrong. Shared hosting providers also sell dedicated, VPS and cloud hosting so they have no interest of having unhappy and potentially customers on cheap plans (a huge chunk of the costs are customer support related).

If you don't get a lot of traffic, then using a shared hosting is perfectly fine, at least where I worked on these servers were very well administered, and we encountered very few glitches and edge cases - shared hosting actually caused much fewer headaches to admins and gNOC than the Virtuozzo containers.

Perhaps there are some bad actors in the industry, but a lot of customers are pretty happy with the cost and stability of shared hosting, so this is why it still exists.

For the purpose of discussion can anyone define req per min for high, medium, low traffic web sites?

Well, I can tell you that hosting WP sites on a shared host is a big pain in the ... . When a client get's hacked, everyone on the same server (or at least same IP) get's 'tested' for WP vuln. and hacked as well. I found 8 WP accounts hacked in a similar way, on a shared server, one after the other, with the server correctly configured.

Smaller (local) shared hosting companies are good because they offer quick support and are easy to setup. Larger hosts with overcrowded servers and unlimited plans are very bad. Back to your question: shared hosting is good for small sites, local sites that don't have that much traffic (<100k uniques/month), which actually most sites are. As mentioned, smaller hosting companies will notify you if you overuse the server and recommend alternatives. Larger hosts will just block you (but that's ok, you knew what you paid for when you signed up...).

Can you recommend some good local hosts?

Hi, By local I mean local to you:) where you can shake hands with the person who owns the servers.

Every city has at least one very good webmaster that owns or rents a few servers for reselling, even if just as a side gig from his job at the local ISP, for ex.

127.0.0.1

If you're looking in Denver, you can email me (in profile).

https://buyshared.net

The real question is, on October 2017 which shared webhost can you recommend???

I am with Inmotionhosting on their business plan and that has been working fine. They support postgres in addition to mysql which is nice. Other than that nothing special, only that it works and they don't hassle me. It's not very cheap though... USD200 per year.

Hosters scrapped:

- Servage.com

- Greengeeks.com

As mentioned in the other comment, I’ve been using Funio for years and I’ve had a good experience. My needs are very simple in this case as the site is mostly static pages with a small bit of PHP here and there. They’ve added Let’s Encrypt support recently, which is nice.

I'm still using FutureQuest for my main revenue generating website, about 20 years later. I'm still extremely happy with FutureQuest, sites have been very reliable & responsive and I've only had two small downtime incidents in those 20 years. Their support still has that 'small business' feel where you know all the staff by name & they know you & your account personally.

I keep my random experiments on Dreamhost, because I can throw an idea onto the one Dreamhost account to see if it gets any traction. But I'm not happy with Dreamhost's reliability or performance, I often can't even log in. As those sites get traction, I migrate them over to their own FutureQuest account.

VPS,PaaS, Cloud servers are also shared hosting, difference is providing os/container level isolation instead of user account type isolation. So, yes everybody still using "shared" hosting.

I’m still using a Funio shared hosting account for a site I am looking after for someone. ~35GB of data and ~11k page views a week. I have a VPS for my own use but in this case it’s very convenient to have a nice Panelbox UI that the onwner can access to make changes himself (he is technical enough to write HTML by hand but not technical enough to manage a server). Price wise it is a bit cheaper than a realiable KVM VPS and the service has been very good for years.

Anecdotal: Ease of use has always been a major selling point for shared hosting, now more than ever. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, and John's Pizza sure as hell doesn't know what a VPS is. They just need a simple WordPress install.

> Ease of use has always been a major selling point

You're right, but that doesn't mean people need shared hosting, it means people need managed hosting.

Shared hosting is a gimmick model designed to make hosting companies rich based on the concept that 99% of websites will be failures.

And it is _nothing more than that_.

By your own description, doesn't that make it a great model in "99%" of cases?

If you outgrow it, sure, but your odds of a small business or little WordPress blog outgrowing such a thing are quite small. Paying more might not make sense in that "99%"of websites.

I operated in the shared hosting space for years and sold a shared hosting company to a company you know for six figures (not "omg" but I was 19 and it was only two years old) — I'm very, very familiar with shared hosting. I've been in it for more than 10+ years.

> You're right, but that doesn't mean people need shared hosting, it means people need managed hosting.

I'm going to very much disagree with you.

Why does Joe's Pizza need managed? They can follow one of the zillion tutorials on using fantastico/softaculous to install WordPress, find a theme from ThemeForest, learn how to install it, and then add pages. They don't need to pay ungodly managed hosting fees for their low volume.

What defines a successful website? Not IPOing? I would define a successful website as one that has organic traffic (somehow), content, and response times under 250ms.

If you use my definition, 99% of websites are successful.

Sure, shared hosting is a volume game for the most part because the volume game is _easy_. There are providers who are on the higher-end of shared hosting spectrum, charging a premium and providing a premium. All because you don't see their ads every day doesn't mean they don't exist.

I have some small company websites (mostly Wordpress, 100-200 visitors a day with few dozens active email) on a single share host at DreamHost.

The cost is higher than some VPS. But their panel (and managed hosting service) is very nice and I have no apparent problems.

Although I might choose a DigitalOcean VPS to host new websites, I don't have immediate plan to move away existing websites from DreamHost share host.

I use shared hosting for my personal site and a few low traffic client sites. I use it for my site because it's WordPress and I don't really want a high risk application running alongside some of my other more secure projects. I use it for client sites because they don't get much traffic and it's very cheap meaning I can keep their costs down.

Wordpress is quite secure on its own, just stay away from plugins

My blog and source downloads are on Dreamhost:

http://www.oilshell.org/

It's been working pretty well. It's apparently held up to being on the front page of HN 4-5 times, which generates a large amount of traffic (more than any subreddit it's been on, which is quite a few). It's probably around 50,000 - 100,000 HTTP requests in that day. Being on HN attracts both humans and bots.

Although that's around 1 per second average, it's pretty concentrated in a few hours. But it's not like they can't handle 5-10 requests per second for a single site. It's all on a single machine, but I'm sure their machines can handle thousands of requests per second. It's probably pretty unlikely that more than a few sites on the box get even 1 request per second.

Occasionally people do run wget over the site, but that hasn't seemed to matter either.

I use Siteground for a few wordpress installations - support is excellent and performance is reasonably good - plans are reasonably priced and haven't had any issues. That said, I don't run any intensive applications, just self-contained systems.

Me too. It's so much more cost effective than the alternatives, and support is great. Anything else, I'm happy to run on a PaaS.

I would say support is excellent if you have a problem the rep already knows something about or you get someone who's interested in fixing your issue.

The problem I've just had hasn't been resolved because the rep jumped straight in with what he thought the solution might be. He obviously never read the error message that I pasted and continues not to read or listen to anything that contradicts his theory.

The fault has been marked as resolved by him 3 times now even though it isn't fixed.

This is a problem I have experienced with many well known hosting outfits.

It is why I don't recommend any shared hosts anymore because they are all competing on low price and just about acceptable customer service.

Siteground are one of the better options but the chances of having a similar issue can't be dismissed.

I still have about 5 web sites on HostGator shared hosting. They don't get much traffic, and the cost of keeping them running is very low.

Have you looked at Pride Tech Design? Managed VPS and cheaper than hostgator.

Full disclosure: I am an employee

I quit using Hostgator after they modified their cPanel to prevent you from installing your own SSL certificates and forcing you to buy their own offerings. Seems pretty underhanded (even GoDaddy lets you manually install a LE cert)

Used hostgator when I was in college it was fun installing a php based terminal I could connect to through the browser and snoop around the rest of the shared hosting files outside of where I was "suppose" to be.

Yes, for a few smallish sites I’ve built for clients in the past. The reason being that they are low traffic, the client doesn’t want to spend a huge amount on hosting, and I don’t want to be first line or support for any issues they may have with the hosting or responsible for patching/security as I would be with a VPS.

I’ve been using TSOHost who are a U.K. based company who seem okay. There have been a few issues in the past but their support is prompt and helpful, the hosting reasonably flexible, the prices low, and they have coped with the traffic, so can’t conplain too much.

Yes, I have my private domain including email with 1&1 since 1998...the site itself is nothing special but I‘m to „unmotivated“ to transfer all the mail accounts to my own servers...so yeah ;)

I use a shared host for some personal projects, clients, and friends.

Most people I know aren't tech-savvy and want WordPress or small no-frills HTML website and the ability to upload files through FTP. I want email forwarders and mailboxes that are easy to configure, regular database backups, no-hassle SSL certificates, and decent email support.

I've been using Pair for about 10 years and I've been happy.

Some old clients running Wordpress sites, mostly company landing pages.

Was cheaper to set up an https://forms.mydomain.com to handle a few pieces of formmail type stuff for an otherwise static site (on Cloud Cannon), than use any of the forms as a service things. Using Hostgator for it.

70% of the world available websites run on shared hosting. Most small to medium businesses run on shared hosting.

Disclaimer: worked for Cpanel, which is powering those sites.

It's been a year since I moved the last domain off of hostgator.

Reason I used it so long is email/mail server. Since moving to a vps some emails don't come. Usually important ones that used domain verification.

What did you like and not like about Hostgator?

I was with Rackspace for years, but Liquid Web bought their cloud site service and I am not too fond of the support I have been getting from Liquid Web and am looking to make a change.

I've had to deal with Hostgator on a number of occasions and I can tell you they don't know how to utilize SSH keys their systems are misconfigured and their support people are clueless.

Also I believe they're now owned by EIG which is a corporation that owns a thousand crappy shared hosting companies and is universally reviled in professional circles.

A lot of things to like and not.

Support is terrible and unlimited claims are false because of other rules around inode limits and cpu limits.

They are still one of the better bigger shared providers. Speed isn't bad. Cpanel itself saves lots of time.

Have you configured DKIM and SPF on your VPS's DNS?

and MX foremost!

I haven't did think it was important unless I was sending emails. I will look into it.

Anything I would previously have used shared hosting for (so static websites) now just gets thrown up on S3, a Cloudfront origin put in front of that, and after that I just stop thinking about it.

Most shared hosts are scams that dissable your account if you get any traffic. But Mythic Beasts is great I host 5 websites on them for the cost of a panini. They host my email too, works fine.

I have clients on godaddy who refuse to consider any alternatives so unfortunately I have to deal with shared hosting.

Check out webfaction.com.

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