calmighty

Monika at Easy WordPress wrote the other day about the risks of shared hosting. I thought I’d clarify and write a little more about the issue here.

Using a shared hosting plan for your Websites or blogs can be problematic if you are sharing your IP address with other domains not under your control. Yesterday’s post about name based virtual hosts described how one IP address can have many domains. What I didn’t mention is that if you use a shared hosting plan where you do not control all of the domains on a given server, you are accepting a certain level of risk. As Monika pointed out, what if a domain on the same IP address you use is a spammer?

Once discovered, many networks may block access to that IP address. Also, what if there are sites that contain adult content? Lots of employers use filters such as Websense to filter the content available on the corporate network. Can you afford to be offline or banned by Google AdSense? Or any other revenue stream for that matter?

It pays to know who your neighbors are. There’s a neat tool called My IP Neighbors which allows you to enter your IP or domain name and returns a list of any other domains hosted on the IP address associated with your domain.

If like me, you are using an inexpensive host to incubate your sites, there isn’t a lot to risk. However, once you start to scale, it makes a lot of sense to at least make sure you move up to a dedicated IP address if not a virtual private server or dedicated server. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive, but it does mitigate a bunch of risk.

Have you ever had a hosting problem due to problematic neighbors? Share your story in the comments.