Shared hosting is really cheap. I have 4 shared hosting accounts. If I get trouble on one account, I can move important sites. This is also a good way to back up a site, by having files stored on 2 servers.
Shared hosting offer unlimited domains and unlimited bandwidth. But, this is completely misleading. The issue is CPU use. They can block your account for excess CPU usage. So don’t put too many sites on one shared hosting. In particular it is mysql databases, scripts and other applicants which are heavy on using mysql.
I recommend using wp cache Super – This can make a site effectively static and reduce CPU usage significantly. – I’m still working on what optimal settings for WP-cache are. Would appreciate any comments in this regard.
At the very least use WP-cache and increase the expiry time from 3600 seconds to 99936000 seconds. WP-cache is slightly easier as it doesn’t involve rewritting .htaccess
Fantastico?
Initially I wanted fantastico because it makes it easy to install wordpress – you just click a button to install and upgrade. However, people tell me fantastico is no Good and can lead to problems. It is actually not necessary to have fantastico and wordpress is quite easy to install. Definitely don’t use fantastico for installing drupal.
I recommend this plugin – for automatic upgrades – this really saves a lot of trouble. See also Wordpress backups for manual backups
Automatic Backups. A great advantage of Dreamhost is that they are always doing automatic backups of your mysql databases and you can easily access a database from 12 hours ago or 2 days ago.
However, if you don’t use dreamhost. This is a useful plugin, – wp database backup – you can use it for one off backups or you can automatically order monthly / weekly backups
- Streamline. Reliable and relatively fast. Bulk User is £79.99. For this you can host 10 domains with 10 mysql databases.It has no fantastico for easy install and backup of wordpress. However, with the right wordpress plugins this is not a worry. Support is not particularly helpful. But, if you know what you are doing, it is a good service.
- Hostican. Reliable and good uptime performance. They offer ‘unmetered bandwidth’ and unlimited domains. But, like most shared hosting this is misleading. You can soon start getting ‘abuse notices’ for usuing too much CPU power. I have an account with 6-7 small wordpress blogs, but, started getting these problems after 12 months. Hostican seem to have the lowest threshold of CPU use for shared hosting. They say if you exceed 20 then it automatically closes your account for 5 minutes. – They don’t always tell you which is annoying because it is hard to know when you have exceeded the quota. This has put me off hostican, even though otherwise they have offered good performance.
- Dreamhost. Not without some problems. But, uptime is pretty good for shared hosting. Dreamhost help are very helpful. They solved a few wordpress bugs / issues, which I couldn’t work out. This kind of support I have not had anywhere else, not even with some managed VPS. Dreamhost also seem to allow much greater CPU usage than hostican. Disk space and bandwidth are more than you could use. I keep waiting to receive notices about exceeding CPU usage, but, haven’t had any yet.
Some have said that his experience of dreamhost shared hosting was it was very slow for wordpress. I have not found this on my account. – It may depend on which server you get lumped. But, it shows that shared hosting is always something of a lottery, and high performance can not be guaranteed.
