In this article let’s take a look at whether is shared hosting good for WordPress or not by looking at all the pros and cons of shared hosting in detail.
This is the most comprehensive guide you can find on this topic so you can bookmark this article.
So without further ado let’s get started.
What is shared hosting?
The simple definition of shared hosting is that, shared hosting is a method of hosting your website along with multiple other websites on a single server and the resources of the server like storage and bandwidth will be distributed to all the websites stored in the server equally.
A simple way to understand shared hosting is, consider you are living in a rental hostel room for your college along with a bunch of your college friends and just like how you will be sharing the room with your friends in the hostel like bed,
electricity, food, water similarly shared hosting is like a rental room of the hostel where you will be sharing the server resources like bandwidth, storage along with other websites which are stored in the server like friends in the hostel room.
Is shared hosting good for wordpress?
Overall share hosting can be a good option for your WordPress website for beginners only and as your website grows with more traffic, You should probably switch to different hosting providers like cloud hosting or dedicated hosting to improve your website loading speed up time increase your website storage, bandwidth and website security.
Now let’s take a look at all the pros and cons of shared hosting in detail.
Shared hosting pros and cons
Pros of shared hosting
Cheap & budget friendly
One of the main advantages of shared hosting is that it is cheap and budget friendly.
If you choose any hosting provider like bluehost for example you can start your website on WordPress for as low as $65 per annum using the shared hosting of bluehost and because it is so cheap and budget-friendly anyone and everyone can create a website on WordPress and make it online and accessible to anyone.
Because of hosting being very cheap and affordable for anyone it has a low barrier of entry if you want to start online business of blogging.
User friendly
Another advantage of using share hosting is that it is also very user friendly because in shared hosting you do not have to manage and maintain the server hardware and security as the hosting provider will take care of it of managing and maintaining the server in the back end and you can obviously get a control panel to manage all of your tasks of your website and you can directly send files to your server from the FTP of your host.
But compared to bigger hosting plants like dedicated or virtual private server, managing a share hosting is a lot more easier and user friendly and You do not need any technical skills in order to manage your shared hosting and if you’re not a techy guy then shared hosting can be a good option for your WordPress website.
Install WordPress fast
Another benefit of using shared hosting for WordPress is that you can install WordPress for it fast and there are many shared hosting providers which are personalised for WordPress websites for example you can try bluehost managed WordPress hosting
which provides shared hosting for WordPress websites on the bluehost and the best part about bluehost is that you can install WordPress on your hosting provider within a few clicks and minutes and you also get other benefits including caching, CDN and staging, automatic WordPress security updates, SSL, support, etc.
Easily upgrade your hosting
Last main advantage of shared hosting is that many popular web hosting providers offer shared hosting including bluehost, siteground, hostinger, and because of this you can easily switch and upgrade your hosting from shared hosting to dedicated and cloud hosting in future if you want as your website grows and
this is very good option because initially when you will start your website you will not be making much money so shared hosting is a good option because it is cheap and budget friendly and as your website grows and it will be making more money you can invest that money in good hosting like dedicated or cloud hosting so shared hosting is a good place to start with for your website.
These are all the advantages of using shared hosting for WordPress websites now let’s take a look at disadvantages of shared hosting.
Cons of shared hosting
Lower loading Speed of your WordPress website
one of the main disadvantages of using shared hosting is speed of the website.
As the definition of shared hosting is that multiple websites will be stored on a single server so because of that the resources of the server will be distributed to all the websites because of that there will be a lower loading speed of the WordPress website compared to other hosting like dedicated or cloud hosting.
And we all know that loading speed for WordPress is quite important and wordpress is not the fastest content management system online, and loading speed can directly affect your search engine ranking and also affect your user experience so
I would highly recommend you to choose the best shared hosting providers like bluehost which provide fast loading speed and also manage the distribution of resources of the server in the shared hosting Which Bluehost does.
Bad Environment of shared hosting
Another disadvantage of shared hosting is the environment of the shared hosting.
The very definition of shared hosting is that your website will be stored along with a bunch of other websites on a single server and you Do not know what is the environment of your website like what kind of websites will be stored beside your website in the server.
For example if your website is stored on a server where a bunch of other websites related to pornography, rummy websites, and adult content websites and others spammy websites then there are many studies which resulted that having your website stored on a server with a bunch of spammy, PBN websites
can negatively impact your website performance in the search results because many spammy ip addresses are blocked and black listed so it can affect your website as well because your website since hosted on shared server has same IP address as other sites so it affects your website as well.
Thankfully few hosting providers offer dedicated IP address for shared hosting like bluehost but still it can have some level of strange impact on your website in search results.
Uptime can be an issue in shared hosting
another disadvantage of choosing a shared hosting is related to the uptime of the website.
Website uptime is the time that a website or web service is available to users in a given period. Represented as a ratio of the time available divided by the total time, the ratio is calculated in monthly or yearly increments. Although 100% uptime is the goal, the industry considers 99.999% uptime as high availability.
The problem with many shared hosting providers is that because a bunch of websites will be stored on a single server so Let’s assume there are 10 websites stored on a single server, out of those 10 websites one website called X requires most resources like bandwidth and server space compared to the remaining 9 websites so because that website X gets more resources, if the remaining websites ask for more bandwidth, due to limit of server bandwidth, the remaining websites can get down.
But thankfully popular hosting providers like bluehost have features to limit server resources to individual websites in order to distribute the server resources equally to all the websites stored on the server And many shared hosting providers offer 99% uptime of their hosting including bluehost and site ground but
still if you have a high traffic website there is always a chance of getting your website down with shared hosting and if your website goes down it creates a bad user experience for the users who are trying to visit your website and they may not return back to your website again in future.
Shared hosting does not allow server customization due to the effect it can have on other customers’ websites, thereby requiring you to use the default server settings configured by your hosting company.
Limited space & bandwidth issue of shared hosting
Another disadvantage of choosing shared hosting for WordPress website is that you can have a limited space and bandwidth for your website and this can be disadvantage because you will have problems to upload large files to your wordpress sites because of limited space, storage and
if any one of your articles You published on your WordPress website ranks high on Google or goes viral on social media and if you get tons of traffic to your website all of a sudden then your website can even get crashed and get down because of limited bandwidth so this can be a big problem of choosing a shared hosting.
Because of this, whenever you are purchasing the shared hosting, please make sure to check at least have 10GB of storage space and unlimited bandwidth option before purchasing the hosting as they are very important requirements for your WordPress website
especially for certain websites like photography website or lifestyle blog or food blog where you will be uploading large files to your website like high quality images, infographics and PDFs which requires lot of storage space.
Website security problem
Website security is very much important especially for WordPress websites and if you choose shared hosting for your WordPress website then your website security can be at risk because WordPress website security relies a lot on the hosting provider and choosing a wrong hosting provider can make or break your website security because
hosting provider will take care of things like DDos protection, web application firewall, brute force attack, malware attacks and many more securities so It is very important to choose a good hosting provider for your website
hosting and you also need to configure some important settings in order to secure your website, You can check out my article for more information on how you can secure your WordPress website apart from hosting in detail here.
These are all the pros and cons of shared hosting for your WordPress website.
Why bluehost is best shared hosting for wordpress?
After looking at all the pros and cons of shared hosting for WordPress website in my opinion bluehost is the right hosting provider You should choose if you want to purchase shared hosting for your WordPress website.
There are many benefits of using bluehost for WordPress website including,
- You can easily install WordPress on your bluehost hosting provider within a few clicks and minutes
- Bluehost is the top three hosting recommendations for WordPress website
- Bluehost offers lot of features including a free domain name SSL certificate and unlimited storage and bandwidth for your WordPress website along with automatic WordPress security updates and staging area
- Bluehost also offers free website migration for your website
- Bluehost is also very pocket friendly and you can create a website on WordPress using bluehost for less than $65 per annum with shared hosting on bluehost
- Bluehost also offers 24/7 customer support from email and live chat and they also have 99% uptime guarantee and fast loading speed
- Bluehost also has a easy to use control panel where you can manage all of your website files of the back end easily without much technical knowledge
For more information you can check out my article on bluehost review And you can purchase shared hosting on bluehost for less than $65 per annum using my affiliate link here.
With that said let’s end the article.
Conclusion
These are all the things you need to know about shared hosting for WordPress.
Do comment down what are your thoughts about shared hosting in the comment section below and also share the article with your friends and subscribe to my blog to receive notifications regarding whenever I publish a new article.