Low Price Hosting can cost you in the long run
In today’s oversaturated hosting market, it is remarkably easy to find hosts touting nigh-infinite resources for low, low prices. Unfortunately, going with one of these hosts can be a very high-risk gamble for a multitude of reasons!
Your neighbors on shared hosting could be your downfall
Not your next door neighbors, but the neighbors that share your hosting server with you! (This is where the term “shared hosting” comes from.) Just because your website is legitimate, doesn’t mean any of the others you share a server with aren’t targeted for spamming or phishing users. This could potentially hurt ranking on search engines.
Shared Hosting Opens your Site to Attack
In addition to that, malicious attacks on those other sites could potentially affect yours, depending on the security of the server and web host. You could be powerless to even attempt to fix an issue like this, without a chain of support emails with your web host.
Speed: Ha!
Shared hosting companies tend to oversell their servers to the point where sites are still useable, but quite slow. Google has stated that site speed will affect search engine optimization (SEO), so a decision to use a shared hosting service could push your site down search engine result pages (SERPs).
Malware attacks
Malware attacks on dynamic websites are an incredibly common occurrence nowadays, and sites coded in PHP, like WordPress, are one of the biggest targets. Without constant scanning and monitoring of your site’s files for changes and specific malware attacks, you could easily get infected and not even know it before Google flags your site as distributing malware to users.
Getting back off that list can be a difficult and harrowing experience, possibly involving hiring an outside source to fix your site for you.
Prevention
A service, such as CloudFlare, can help prevent some of these issues by masking your website’s true IP address, but this will still not solve everything. The best method of prevention is to use a Managed Hosting service, with a team of professionals that can monitor your website and know how to fix it when it does break or get attacked. A managed, and possibly dedicated, hosting service will make sure that your site is running the fastest it possibly can.
Here are just a few examples of real people’s issues while on shared hosting services or self-managed hosting services:
- http://wordpress.org/support/topic/malware-attack
- http://wordpress.org/support/topic/entire-site-suddenly-in-italics-1?replies=38
- http://blogcastfm.com/announcements/warning-massive-number-of-godaddy-wordpress-blogs-hacked-this-weekend/
- http://www.wpsecuritylock.com/breaking-news-wordpress-hacked-with-zettapetta-on-dreamhost/