Overcoming or Avoiding Common Shared Web Hosting Issues

When you’ve decided you need a professional web site for your business, you’ll likely want to turn first to a hosted solution. A free site might do the job for you, if you can tolerate not having a dedicated domain name and having competitive advertising listed along-side your own content. The next option would be shared web hosting, which is very economical and still provides more advantages than free hosting. There are some potential disadvantages to shared hosting, but carefully selecting your hosting service will allow you to avoid or eliminate the disadvantages.

Shared hosting is economical because you will be sharing your web server with other contract subscribers. One disadvantage is when the hosting administrators choose to place all the hosted files on separate directories of the same server. This can lead to potential security issues, especially if the file permissions are not correctly configured and maintained. You can overcome this by contracting with a shared web hosting service that maintains each hosted site’s files on their own hard drive partition. This will make maintaining the correct file permissions much easier, and will also ensure that the file space that you are leasing is never impinged by another customer.

Another difficulty can be implementing and supporting secure websites (HTTPS). As hacking and site hi-jacking becomes more common, more people look for secure business sites to do business with. However, many shared web hosting companies use name-based virtual hosting, which is also called shared IP hosting. This means that all the sites on the server share the same Internet address, and are distinguished by the site name following the IP address. By requiring IP-based or dedicated IP hosting, you will be distinguished from all other sites hosted on the server, and can implement a security certificate specific to your site or sites.

Another reason to insist your shared web hosting service use IP-based virtual hosting, or dedicated IP hosting, is to ensure that your web site is always available, if the Domain Name System is malfunctioning, or if a user’s web browser does not send the website’s hostname as part of the website request. If you use name-based virtual hosting, in both instances your site would be inaccessible, and the user would receive a response indicating your site doesn’t exist. However, if you are using dedicated IP hosting, the Internet will revert to the IP address of your site, and still deliver your content to the customer.