Some of the offers out there for web hosting seem like a steal. Hosts offering tons of space, unlimited resources, all for no more than a Starbucks coffee per month.

You’d be crazy to pass on these type of accounts, right?

Unfortunately, when a web hosting offer seems so attractive and at such a low price, there are some sacrifices that are made…

Those sacrifices are at the expense of the client, in order for the web hosting company to make a profit. Here’s three secrets that budget web hosts don’t want you to know.

1. Resource limits are quite restrictive

Most of the budget web hosts have to pack their servers full of accounts to turn a profit. It’s typical to see thousands of accounts per server.

Even with software that web hosts use to manage spikes and keep resources available, thousands of websites all clamoring for precious resources like CPU, memory, and disk performance will put a severe strain on the server. In order to avoid the server crashing or becoming borderline unusable, budget hosts set very low limits on what a site can use in terms of server resources.

If your site becomes somewhat busy, or a handful of visitors are hitting your blog or ecommerce application at the same time, your account will likely be throttled to reduce its consumption of cpu / memory. This means your site will be quite slow, unusable, or even suspended by the host. This can happen without your knowledge, and at a time where you need the resources to support more visitors.

Contrast this with a reputable web hosting company that has an undersold environment.

What do I mean by “undersold”? This means that the number of accounts per server are much lower than the maximum allowed. This allows any one site to consume the resources it needs within reason such that no throttling or suspensions occur.

A good web host will manage these resources effectively, and leave plenty of horsepower available to easily handle spikes in usage.

2. Too much data stored for effective backups and restores

Tons of accounts on a server with virtually no limits on disk space translates to servers with many Terabytes (1,024 GB = 1 TB) of data (some over 5 or 10 TB). That is a lot of data to backup and be able to restore.

When disaster strikes, and this enormous amount of data has to be restored, it could take *DAYS* for this to complete. Days is not an exaggeration. I’ve seen it many times.

Why would it take days? Assuming a conservative restore rate of 100 Gigabytes per hour, a server with 4 Terabytes of data would take just under TWO full days to be restored.

On the other end of the spectrum, a web host that undersells and has responsible disk space limits is in a better position for a fast recovery. Servers with 100-200 GB of data can be restored in a few hours at most.

3. Performance is quite abysmal

If you rely on anything besides plain text and images for your site, performance is quite important. In an oversold budget hosting environment, servers are already close to being maxed out. Hard drives are overworked, free cpu cycles are scarce.

This results in any dynamic element (i.e. MySQL, PHP, ecommerce, a blog, etc…) on your site being much slower than it should be. Your code is waiting in line like everyone else on the server, trying to use these resources. The log jam causes pages to load slowly.

How slow? We’ve seen other hosts deliver page loads for blogs and ecommerce applications in the 5 to 15 second range. That is an eternity to wait for both customers and search engines like Google. Visitors will penalize you by clicking to another site, tired of waiting for your pages to load. Google will penalize you by ranking your site’s speed below other websites, which can lower your site in the search results.

We’ve had new clients that use ShopSite as their ecommerce application believe that the admin panel for ShopSite is slow. It wasn’t until they moved to us that they realized that ShopSite’s back office is actually quite fast! They couldn’t believe the difference. That is what good web hosting should do for your site.

What’s it like in a properly managed undersold hosting environment? Dynamic pages should load as fast as plain text. Your visitors and visiting search engines will give you bonus points for a speedy and pleasant browsing experience.

Curious if your current web host is fast? Take our Speed Challenge and find out!

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Not all web hosts are run equally well. They may have slick ads and talk up their services, but if they put too many accounts on a server, and have price points that require packing them in like sardines… limits, storage, and performance will suffer to a large degree.

If you rely on your website for income or as a go-to resource for others, you’ll want to insure that the web host you choose can deliver on its promises. Ask questions like:

• How many accounts do you put on a server?

• How do you ensure my site will run fast and always have access to server resources?

• Are there any Terms of Service limits placed on my account?

• What is the typical amount of disk space used per server?

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I was recently following a discussion by web hosting owners and employees about the use of new software for web hosts. They were discussing software that can help web hosts manage resources on servers. Software which helps regulate server environments.

I was shocked and disappointed with how the conversation progressed. It was along these lines…

Host A: “Product X is great. It allows us to easily host 1,000 or more accounts per server without any issues with load spikes, or instability“

Host B: “Yeah, Product Y has enabled us to host 3,000 – 4,000 sites per server, really maximizing our potential“

Host C: “I agree. The software throttles any heavy users, keeping things humming along for the most part. Everyone wins“

Vendor A: “Yes, our software has many of the large hosts packing in 5,000 or more websites per server. It’s great.“

Host D: “Yep. The software auto throttles the more resource intensive clients, allowing the serve to remain stable, even with thousands of sites hosted on the server.“

Almost everyone in the discussion was singing the praises of both the software and the fact that they can pack em in like sardines and not have their servers crash.

No one was stating what I found to be obvious:

In doing this, each individual client (aka “sardine”) is the one that loses, although the good of the whole is sort of maintained.

What do I mean? I’ll explain…

Each server has a finite number of resources to go around (memory, CPU, drive load). Think of each server as a pie. The hosting clients are then sharing these resources between their sites.

In pie terms, you have customers that are each eating a slice of pie from the whole pie. The more customers there are, the smaller each slice becomes.

If you have thousands of clients on a server, the size of the slice they have when it comes to available resources is quite small (think crumb size). All it takes to go over your allotment is a small spike in traffic, or traffic that’s hitting your dynamic pages like your blog, shopping, cart, etc…

What’s wrong with throttling?

So what, you exceeded your allotment. Who cares right? The overall server is stable.

When these software solutions throttle your site, that means they slow it down. Not just a little. They slow it to a crawl. They limit what it can do, so as to not use the resources that the other thousand plus are clamoring for. This means your website suffers greatly. You’re penalized for any appreciable use you try to get out of your site. You lose, “everyone” wins.

The sad thing is everyone has come to expect this as the norm. Slower than normal websites, throttled resources, very limited accounts, it’s all just part of how it all works.

Except that this is *NOT* the norm for web hosts that provide true quality and performance, day in and day out.

Shared hosting done right

Why was I so shocked by this nonchalant convo other web hosts were having?

I was shocked because we provide a service that is directly opposite of what these other hosts were promoting.

• We limit the number of accounts to 100 – 200 per server max.

• We don’t throttle any accounts, so any one site can use the resources needed (and available) whenever it’s needed.

• We use better quality hardware than many hosts that packs thousands of accounts on a server, allowing our clients to experience truly fast web hosting.

To me, this is how web hosting should be. This is what clients should expect as the baseline for their accounts.

Not some overloaded, severely throttled, watered down version of hosting that many of the major hosts out there profess to be enterprise level hosting.

Hosting is not magic. There are a set number of resources per server, a set number of clients per server, and income generated from a monthly price that is charged.

In the fastest “race to the bottom” mentality, many web hosts have decided to jam each server full of thousands of clients, severely limit resources, make the entire process mediocre at best in terms of speed and performance, and charge the equivalent of a can of coke per month in fees.

Of course they need to put thousands of clients on a server – They are not charging enough to make it work otherwise. The hosting clients suffer, the servers are not even remotely fast, and the level of customer support (many times outsourced) is abysmal at best. But hey, the hosts don’t have to do much work now, as the super-duper automated software will magically keep the server stable.

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You should expect more from your web host. Hosting does not have to be something you suffer through.

As the industry converges towards a commodity based, commune like environment, where everyone must suffer a little for the good of the hosting company, realize that there are hosts out there that still care about each person’s hosting experience. Hosts like us that cater towards the business based website that needs fast hosting. Hosts that provide the resources required for a successful website.

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