Shared Hosting and Site Downtime

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Shared hosting is used by thousands of customers throughout the world.  The main issue with shared hosting is site downtime.  Site downtime can be caused by a variety of issues.  Restoring from a downtime period could be due to complete chance or more advanced measures may have to be taken by either the customer or the administrative controller of the servers that house the hosting plan.

Downtime with Shared Hosting Service

Most commonly, shared hosting services will often tent to go offline due to high levels of traffic on a server that is being shared.  This high traffic may be to another website.  A script may also be written incorrectly and is causing a large amount of activity on the server or a website may have been featured on another website that is very popular causing a spike in users and visitors on a website.  Of course this type of downtime is common with shared hosting and will usually go away once the server is not clogged with requests for downloads of content and general connections to the website.

Another thing that happens with shared hosting services is the fact that many users will choose a cheap option that is ok at first but will soon be outgrown.  Shared hosting is notorious for providing low amounts of bandwidth and storage which is easily breached within the first month of real usage of the hosting.  This means that a large portion of the websites that are created will be forced to be closed down until the following month because they have exceeded their limits for hosting.  This can be resolved in one way and that means that the website owner will need to pay for a restoration of their bandwidth and space or increase their plan substantially to be able to cover their higher usage.

One more cause of downtime with shared hosting is problems on the server.  Many of the shared hosting services are affected due to problems that originate from the server.   A disk on a server may crash or break and that can cause a loss of data.  This in turn requires someone to fix the problems on the physical server which can take a large portion of time.  Data may not be recoverable and this means that any accounts hosted on that portion of the server can lose their data unless there is a system in place that makes backups available from the hosting service.

Shared hosting is genuinely a great service for those who need an affordable option with their hosting.  This helps to prevent overspending and having a great budget for a website.  When hosting needs are much more important to the website such as when it becomes popular, switching over to another option which is more reliable is often the answer.  Dealing with a service such as shared hosting that has a lot of downtime can mean a loss of visitors, loss of revenue and more than likely many chances to get the website viewed and recommended to others.