IdolBlogLive is no more live, The Shared Hosting Experience
I was reading this week a sad experience of the IdolBlogLive.com, as you may understand it's blog about the popular Amercian Idol ! Few days before the final, the blog have received a unexpected traffic which exceed the 3500 page views in an hour from about 500 visitors. So the hosting company, Surpass Hosting, switched the service off without any warning and refused to allow access even to retrieve files. Djslim, the owner of the blog, said that “The only way to come back online or to retrieve the files is to upgrade my account which costs $110.00 a month.”. Currently the domain is displaying the famous message "This Account Has Been Suspended".
Shared hosting is certainly an excellent solution for new bloggers, but if you buy an account without reading the agreement between you and the hosting provider never come after something bad happen to your account and say I didn't know ! This is one of the major problem that new bloggers don't give importance and in the end find themselves in trouble. For example to deal with hosting providers such Surpass, you have to keep always a backup of your codes and database daily ! You download the backup and keep it available in case something happen.
Personaly I have experienced many hosting providers and their shared hosting and never faced something similar. Everytime the service exceed the cpu limit for example, I got an email from the provider asking me gently to fix this or find another provider. And I consider this more serious and professional procedures to take, rather than blocking the hosting account and forcing the user to upgrade. Even if they did, I have always a backup of my work.
Other thing to consider with shared hosting, is the kind of software to use, I don't recommand wordpress for bloggers having high traffic and shared hosting. Not only wordpress, most of the blog software will usually crash the server with high traffic. So the solution in that cases ? The solution is publishing tools such Movable type, if the server side processing is most of the time used by the publisher himself, visitors will have only static page and this is one of the reasons that makes such websites able to support high traffic even on shared hosting. The reason : no resources consuming at all !
There is some solutions for wordpress for example caching plugins, I didn't personaly test but it might reduce considerably the memory consumption. Also consider keeping your eye always on stats and your content, for example if you are running wordpress, with cache plugin etc..., and you have been digged, so just say hello to server crash ! Because it's inevitable. I didn't test wordpress, but this is an information I know about LifeType, currently a normal blog will only require between 4 and 6 Mb of memory to run so if you multiply by the number of visitors online in the same time we find a server with 1GB of RAM won't support more than 166 users. At this limit the server will simply crash, and usually on shared hosting the account crash before this limit due to server-side scripts which start killing processes automaticly.
So the experience depend really from a hosting provider to another, and the most efficient way is to know exactly your needs, try to stay in the authorized limits, read your rights carefully before to buy, observe your account and make regular backup, then upgrade when necessary. There is really quality hosting provider that offer very good services, and this is something you could know by experience.
Source picture : Problogger.net
