andreasviklund.com

I've written a long blog entry about hosting companies and their incredible shared account hosting features, and about the value of comparing different hosts using good hosting directories and independent hosting reviews to find a host that you can trust. But I haven't posted it yet since it is pretty critical, and I'm really not the kind of person who complain in public. I have had major problems with my shared hosting account, and it forced me to step up to a better hosting solution: having an expensive virtual private server plan. I wanted to share the full story and the lessons I learned from it, but the post is still in draft mode.

But seeing that the host I work with, SiteGround, has boosted their shared hosting packages to an amazing level (24 gigabytes of space, 800 gigabytes of traffic and lots of "unlimited" and "free" extras in the included services) made me think about it again. The shared hosting account I had with SiteGround couldn't manage to run a single WordPress installation (default install from the included Fantastico) and a statistics script, because it overloaded the server for me. Sure, I had lots of visitors on the site, over 2.000 unique hits per day at the time of the overload. But I was still only using less than 300 megabytes of space and less than 50 gigabytes of traffic per month, so I was nowhere near the limits. What caused the overload for me was the number of simultaneous PHP processes running (I used 16, but only 15 were allowed at any given time). This number is written in the terms where it is presented as a limit, not a as a feature. But users can't see this number anywhere, only SiteGround admins can see it "internally".

So you can get a cheap hosting account with amazing features and an amazingly friendly and fast customer support (which is the reason why I stick with SiteGround after all!), but chances are big that you will never be able to use all those amazing features. If you run a website which is popular enough to send out hundreds of gigabytes of traffic per month, you will probably have reached the 15 processes limit long ago. And if that happens, you won't know about it until SiteGround has suspended your account because of your "abuse". It happened to me (twice!) and it has happened to others. In most cases, because of high popularity and lots of visitors on the site. And it is of course not a SiteGround-specific problem, I've seen the same thing happen on several major hosts. It makes me mad, because I think that the most logical thing to do is to give the user a warning and a chance to fix the problem first. But the current standard for dealing with "abuse" is to kill the account without giving users a chance to fix the problem. Stupid.

But as mentioned, I use the SiteGround VPS service now, and it works perfectly. And all the trouble with regular shared hosting accounts, i've learned that VPS is what I should have got right from the start. I have 25 gigabytes of space, 400 gigabytes of traffic, reserved server resources (including 768mb RAM), and I can host several websites on the VPS if I want to.

So to summarize the point of my long and yet unpublished hosting post and this entry: Choose a host that you can trust. Not a host that promises too much. I still recommend SiteGround, because of the great features and the amazing customer support. But I do not recommend the cheap $4.95 shared accounts - unless you are absolutely sure that your website will have very few visitors. If you expect a lot of visitors on the site in the future, you should consider a VPS account from the very start. It costs a lot, but it may be very worth it. SiteGround offers packages from $89 to $169 depending on the amount of features. But once again, use a hosting directory such as Best10WebHosting.com to find a host that you feel that you can trust.