Choosing Good Shared Hosting

In our recent survey we discovered that 61% of Perchers choose shared hosting to host their Perch sites. We know from support that not all shared hosting is equal, so here are some suggestions for selecting good shared hosting. This is a companion post to our post sharing your recommendations for hosting – Hosting For Perchers Recommended by Perchers.

Perch has very simple requirements. You need PHP (PHP5.3 as a minimum will be required from the next version of Perch), MySQL and if you want to resize images either the GB or ImageMagik libraries. This should be completely standard on most PHP hosting companies. However to ensure your site performs well, you probably want to avoid the real budget hosting plans.

Shared hosting means shared resources

When you buy shared hosting, your site lives on a physical server with lots of other websites. All of those sites are competing for the resources of that server sharing the memory and available CPU. The cheaper the hosting plan the more sites need to be packed onto each server to make the business profitable.

If one website is doing some memory or CPU intensive task, then it is going to reduce the resources available to your site. This is why sometimes on cheap hared hosting we see people puzzled as to why their image resizing is timing out. It appears that their plan should have enough resources to perform the operation but that doesn’t mean it is available.

There is decent shared hosting available but we would advise paying a bit more than the cheapest available if your site is important to you. If you know you want to upload and process large images via the Perch admin.

Are servers kept up to date and secure?

If you create a new account it should be running a minimum of PHP 5.4. Webhosts are often concerned to update PHP on their servers because the update might break legacy applications. However they should be able to put new accounts on up to date servers. Newer versions of PHP5 are faster than older versions and as very old versions reach their end of life they stop getting security updates, which is obviously a bad thing!

If the host runs control panel software, installs PHPMyAdmin or any other scripts for you, are they kept up to date? If not this should ring alarm bells as these scripts need to be kept up to date in order that any security patches released are applied.

Searching the web, or Twitter for the company name can give you some insight into security at the host. Do you find a lot of people complaining that their site has been hacked? That is often indicative of an issue at the host rather than individual sites.

Hosting company support

One way to keep costs down at a cheap host is to offer very little support. We always try and help Perchers who are having hosting issues but in many cases there is nothing we can do other than explain what you need to ask your host. If they are unresponsive or unhelpful you may feel stuck in the middle with nowhere to turn.

Find out what support is available, once again searching the web, Twitter or the hosting company forums can be enlightening here.

Backups and access to your data

What backups does the host keep, and can you access them if you (or your client) accidentally does something that deletes some data? Are you able to easily backup your MySQL data and site files?

Where is my PHP error log?

A live server should be configured to log to a file, rather than output errors to screen. Make sure you have access to this before you need it. We have encountered some hosts that do not allow customers access to their own error log, ask the question before taking out an account and make a note of where to find the log so that in an emergency you can look up the error.

What can you configure?

Some hosts require that you configure PHP sessions yourself, which you will need to do to install Perch. Some hosts have pretty much locked down PHP, and others allow you to tweak the settings for PHP. Find out what you can do and how to do it.

Uptime and what happens when things go wrong?

Most hosts give some uptime guarantee which usually gives you some money back if the site is down, however if your site is down you want it back up rather than a few dollars in credit! Downtime is pretty much a fact of life, sometimes it is upstream of the host and something they have little control over, the important thing is how they deal with it when it happens.

Look for hosts that communicate well with customers when downtime happens. Do they keep informing customers on Twitter or via an official channel? Do they provide a post mortem after the event, explaining what happened and any measures put in place to prevent the problem again if possible?

Stepping up from shared hosting

We know that many of you like shared hosting because it means that someone else is looking after the server, and it tends to be less expensive than alternatives. However these days you can get a decent VPS package for not much more than a shared hosting account. Several companies offer managed VPS packages so you don’t need systems administration skills in order to keep your server up to date and secure.

While multiple virtual servers are hosted on one physical box, unlike shared hosting each site should have resources assigned to it. You shouldn’t find that another site hosted on the same piece of hardware is able to effect your site. It is also unlikely that another site on the same hardware could be compromised in such a way that would give an attacker access to your site.