Upgrade from shared hosting really needed for personal website?

[PenguinManiac]

Upgrading from a hosting plan to other is usually only recommended once your previous bandwidth limit has grown tight, and the time it takes to meet that threshold is entirely dependant on the website's size, niche and, obviously, category. E-commerce websites are more likely to walk a steeper growing curve than blogs and personal websites, and this obviously makes for different requirements.

Given that normal personal websites will most likely use < 1 GB bandwidth a month (unless you allow file sharing or something), and that most shared hosting plans provide even higher threshold, do you think that upgrading to anything beyond shared hosting is needed for a personal website/blog?

 

[virtubox]

Hello PenguinManiac, for me the upgrade from shared hosting is not related to the bandwidth. Even with traffic a website doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. That's the same for the storage.
So in my opinion, it should not be needed for a personal website/blog.
But if you have several website, it can be a good idea to use a vps and to host them on your vps.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

If it is a personal site that you are not making a living from and it does not matter if it slows to a crawl or is unreachable from time to time, shared hosting is fine.

If your income depends on the site being up and responding fast, then you need more control. That is where a VPS or dedicated server comes in.

 

[Gazoo]

I like Rob's answer and that about sums it up. :thumb:


I will add that there are other things to consider as well. One being that not all shared web hosting services are the same and there can be a drastic performance difference form one web host to another.

I have been using only shared hosting for years and there are some that are awful and some that are great so throwing shared hosting into one general category is not exactly accurate. There are also some big differences in performance from one shared host to another.

Plus there are a lot of differences that you might not see unless you get all the details from each host. One area in particular where a lot of shared hosting services differ is the amount of RAM that you are allocated and that can have a big impact on performance.

There are also other differences that can also affect the performance of a shared web hosting service and affect the need to upgrade or change hosting services.



Back to your question, Unless you have your site built with something that is high resource usage then most of the time I doubt that you would need anything other than shared hosting.

There are some shared hosting services that you can get that you would not need to upgrade unless you had very high traffic numbers or you were sing something that had high resource demands.

You should be fine on shared hosting and a VPS might be overkill and a waste of money unless there is some other reason that shared hosting won't work.

 

[PenguinManiac]

Hello PenguinManiac, for me the upgrade from shared hosting is not related to the bandwidth. Even with traffic a website doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. That's the same for the storage.
So in my opinion, it should not be needed for a personal website/blog.
But if you have several website, it can be a good idea to use a vps and to host them on your vps.

Oh, I hadn't thought about that! That would definitely save a lot of money. Plus, most VPSs give way more resources than you would need for a single website, so several of them should fit snugly in them. Thank you!

If it is a personal site that you are not making a living from and it does not matter if it slows to a crawl or is unreachable from time to time, shared hosting is fine.

If your income depends on the site being up and responding fast, then you need more control. That is where a VPS or dedicated server comes in.

Yeah, reliability is king with that kind of websites. Still, wow, can bad shared hostings really give that kind of bad performance? I thought most major companies still guaranteed a standard to protect their public image, so I presume that kind of bad performance is only to be expected from minor emerging companies, right...?

I like Rob's answer and that about sums it up. :thumb:


I will add that there are other things to consider as well. One being that not all shared web hosting services are the same and there can be a drastic performance difference form one web host to another.

I have been using only shared hosting for years and there are some that are awful and some that are great so throwing shared hosting into one general category is not exactly accurate. There are also some big differences in performance from one shared host to another.

Plus there are a lot of differences that you might not see unless you get all the details from each host. One area in particular where a lot of shared hosting services differ is the amount of RAM that you are allocated and that can have a big impact on performance.

There are also other differences that can also affect the performance of a shared web hosting service and affect the need to upgrade or change hosting services.



Back to your question, Unless you have your site built with something that is high resource usage then most of the time I doubt that you would need anything other than shared hosting.

There are some shared hosting services that you can get that you would not need to upgrade unless you had very high traffic numbers or you were sing something that had high resource demands.

You should be fine on shared hosting and a VPS might be overkill and a waste of money unless there is some other reason that shared hosting won't work.

Thank you for the detailed answer! Yeah, they can vary a lot, but I wouldn't even count in those minor companies that can't provide a reliable enough service. I agree with everything you said, and that's what lead me to ask this question in the first place.

 

[Gazoo]

Gazoo

You are welcome.

There are a lot of the smaller companies that you have to be careful of but then again there are many good ones. You just have to make sure that you do some checking on any web hosting provider that you are considering for hosting your website/s.

I do usually stay with know companies but I always have a hosting package on one of the small cheap ones for testing purposes. It comes in handy not to have to test things on my good sites and hosting.

You do also have to be careful of many of the larger companies because some of them have gotten to the point that they don't care about the quality or level of service that they provide because they are looking at the bigger picture and they are not affraid to lose some customers because for each they lose, they will gain 10's. 100's or 1000's more. In fact there is one huge company that owns several brands that is one of the worst that you can have.

Caution and investigation into a company and their ability to provide quality services that fit your needs is always beneficial.

 

[PenguinManiac]

PenguinManiac

That's true. I think I may know what company you're referring to, as I've heard not-so-good tales about its overall quality, despite its low prices. I guess paying a visit to any hosting review website and sorting ratings by date can't hurt, huh?

 

[Gazoo]

Gazoo

If you are thinking of a 3 letter company then you are probably right. :clap:

Web hosting review sites are not always a good way to get good quality information since most of the review sites are making money through the affiliate programs of the hosting companies. There are a few around that probably have reliable information but finding them and knowing if the information that they provide is good or not might not be as easy as it should be.

One of the better ways to find out about a web host and their quality of services and support is to try to find people who have used the host in questions' services. Forums like this are a good place to find information like that. I also heard that you may be able to get good information through Facebook Groups, but I have never checked them myself so I can't verify that.

Hosting choices are an important thing that many people do not fully realize the importance of until they get stuck with a poor host. It's always a wise idea to look around and see what you can dig up on any hosting service you are considering using and try to avoid the review sites unless you can tell if they are providing good quality and unbiased reviews.

 

[Soulwatcher]

I think it all depends, most shared hosts say you get 1 full CPU. But what they usually don't tell you is the 1 full cpu is for a 60 second cycle. So CPU can be a real problem depending on the nature of your website. I have a Blog/forum with a wordpress bridge and I get around 20 posts a day and I am already seeing CPU limits on my shared hosting plan. Which is very discouraging knowing that I am going to need a VPS really soon!

 

[virtubox]

virtubox

"Full CPU" is a marketing work, because even on the biggest dedicated server available, you cannot have more than 48 CPU cores. When you can easily host thousands of website on a server like that. Most part of providers use Cloudlinux to isolate each website, but it's only a container virtualization technology. To have dedicated resources, a full virtualization like KVM is required.

 

[JoeMilford]

For the purposes of my personal website, I don't think I would need this kind of upgrade. I use it mainly as a platform for my C.V. and a list of my publications, etc. That being said, I don't think it would ever be necessary, in my situation, to beef up that particular site in this way.