I’m a bit wired on coffee right now, but this is a rant that has been building for awhile. Shared hosting sucks. After years of experience with many different providers and situations, I’m fed up with it. The idea is great, a shared utilization of resources because usually one person on a server is not going to use 100% of the resources, but how the situation is with most providers is terrible. Recently, I’ve been coming around more and more to the idea of a VPS, a shared server setup, but not sharing just one system.

To rant specifically, I’m tired of dealing with other people. Most shared hosts have CPanel or some other web-based GUI management system that is usually not efficient enough for me. I am definitely an advanced or expert user. I need SSH and direct access on a server. When CPanel can’t solve things for me, I have to ask for someone else’s help to fix things, which can take hours or might not even resolve the situation. Relying on other people un-efficient, especially when I have no clue about how competent these people are. I prefer to learn and solve things myself. With the big interest in VMWare recently and VPS software in general, more companies are offering VPS solutions at reasonable cost. The general limiting factor is RAM, due to the physical capacity of most 32-bit servers at 4GB, so you might only get a VPS with 128mb RAM. I find this actually more than reasonable for most website solutions running Apache and MySQL. If you need better performance, run a low memory webserver like nginx or lighttpd. It’s just so much easier to fix something that is broken yourself. From now on, VPS will be my first choice for running a webserver and I hope you do the same.