Why you should avoid shared hosting

Last updated: April 30th 2021

Webdock does not recommend that you use our servers for shared hosting.

We will not stop you from doing so, but you should be aware that you are running a great number of risks and negating a lot of our design decisions which are aimed at keeping your server as stable and efficient as possible. We realize it may be attractive to save money by bundling many apps / sites on a single server, but in general this is a bad idea.

If you for some reason need / want to do Shared Hosting on our servers, your options are:

  1. Configure things manually - please see our guides for Apache and Nginx
  2. Use a Third Party Control Panel

If you opt for option #1 please be aware that some management tools in Webdock which are really geared towards managing a single site, may not work. Namely our easy Let's Encrypt / Certbot integration will stop working for you, and you will need to configure Certbot manually.

The reasons why you should avoid Shared Hosting:

You will have a harder time rolling back your server in case of a hack / failure

You will need some third party backup mechanism which backs up each site as the built-in Webdock snapshotting works by imaging your entire server.

If one site is compromised or hacked or starts misbehaving all your other sites may go down with it

If one site gets your IP blocked, say for sending out SPAM, all the other sites on that server will also become inaccessible

It is much harder to isolate sites on the same server than if you have them neatly separated in each their own VPS/containerIf one site gets compromised it is that much more likely that the entire server and the other sites hosted there will as well.

It is harder to debug high load and performance issuesAny maintenance on the server may take down many sites instead of just oneIn short, you should try to avoid bundling many sites on a single VPS as in case of failure or a hack, you are that much more vulnerable.

 

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