Is shared hosting up to it?

charliewestt · 2016-02-09 12:41:02 UTC

Hi guys,

I have been thinking about selling websites and hosting to a few people for a while.

I’m always getting asked if I can do them for friends family and potential clients.

Will shared hosting be up to the task? The websites would mostly be in wordpress.

I would say within a few months of hosting with dreamhost I would have 10+ sites running.

Please give me some feedback!

Regards

Charlie

LakeRat · 2016-02-09 16:22:53 UTC

Yes, no, maybe.

There’s no reason you can’t put 10+ wordpress sites on one account on shared hosting. (by the way there is wordpress multi-site too, but that’s an advanced area that can be hard for a beginner to get set up.)

Much of the hype about shared hosting stresses the word “unlimited”. (or at least it used to, I haven’t look at the sales page lately).

What’s NOT unlimited on shared hosting is CPU seconds. It’s also a concept that’s really hard to understand and quantify (especially a beginner).

The key is that your sites will likely be low traffic. (High traffic is something that’s getting 100’s or 1000’s of clicks an hour… continually).

A hint at what NOT to do, is load the sites up with lots of plugin’s. Go easy there. A common theme is reading thru the plugins available over at wordpress and adding this and adding that. That will cause performance issues. Also not all plugins work great together. Go slow adding them, decide if you really need it, and if you don’t get rid of it. Don’t just disable unused plugins and theme’s, its important from the standpoint of both performance and security to completely DELETE unused themes and plugins.

charliewestt · 2016-02-09 16:33:49 UTC

Thanks for taking the time to reply,

I am quite an experienced word press user as I have been doing it on another hosting platform for a company I work for.

I have purchased shared now and all seems to be well.

I guess I will have to see how it holds up once I add a few sites.

LakeRat:

Yes, no, maybe.

There’s no reason you can’t put 10+ wordpress sites on one account on shared hosting. (by the way there is wordpress multi-site too, but that’s an advanced area that can be hard for a beginner to get set up.)

Much of the hype about shared hosting stresses the word “unlimited”. (or at least it used to, I haven’t look at the sales page lately).

What’s NOT unlimited on shared hosting is CPU seconds. It’s also a concept that’s really hard to understand and quantify (especially a beginner).

The key is that your sites will likely be low traffic. (High traffic is something that’s getting 100’s or 1000’s of clicks an hour… continually).

A hint at what NOT to do, is load the sites up with lots of plugin’s. Go easy there. A common theme is reading thru the plugins available over at wordpress and adding this and adding that. That will cause performance issues. Also not all plugins work great together. Go slow adding them, decide if you really need it, and if you don’t get rid of it. Don’t just disable unused plugins and theme’s, its important from the standpoint of both performance and security to completely DELETE unused themes and plugins.