I actually only use shared hosting. There’s a good saying: “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”.
I always tend to see people asking for the cheapest hosting.
As someone who works at a hosting company, make sure you understand that most budget provider do tend to “oversell” their shared servers. While more premium shared hosting providers will limit the number of accounts on one single server. This makes a huge difference for the performance of any site on the server, as overuse of the resources of the server is far less common.
In case of our company, our shared hosting is actually more powerful than our VPS offering. Let me give you an example that very few people tend to think about:
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our most basic offering is a VPS with 1vcpu, 1 GB of vRAM and 50 GB of disk. It runs Plesk and allows you to put 30 sites on it. To be complete I’ll indicate that my company charges €19.50 a month during the first year for this.
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Our most basic shared hosting account comes with 50 GB of disk, allows for 5 sites to be put on it, has a memory_limit of 128 MB and goes for € 5.99 a month during the first year.
If we now consider running WordPress, a few plugins and a theme, we need to take into account that WordPress core needs about 32 MB’s of RAM per visitor/php process. On average, a site running a custom theme and some plugins, memory usage of the WP core included, will need about 64 to 128 MB of memory.
Now here’s the important difference between shared hosting and the vps:
On the VPS there’s a maximum cap op 1 GB of memory for the entire server (e.g. serversoftware + all running processes). On the shared hosting this cap is 128 MB per user. So if you take into account that Plesk needs about 256 MB of memory to run smoothly, this leaves 768 MB (give or take) to use for the sites. Divide this by 128 MB (per visitor on a WordPress site) and you can accomodate 6 (!) visitors before your virtual server runs out of memory.
On the shared hosting account we cap the simultaneous visitors per basic hosting account to 50 per site. But our servers are set up so that 50 simultaneous visitors to a site can all use that 128 MB of memory without our server even breaking a sweat.
The point I’m trying to make is that yes, shared hosting does give your lower values in terms of available php memory, but it usually is guaranteed to be available, making shared hosting much more cost efficient.
And with some optimization (using plugins or the .htaccess), you can really accomodate a lot of visitors on a well set up shared hosting account.
While not being a theme created in Blocs (actually currently redesigning that WordPress-site in Blocs), this gives you some insight into the performance of a full blown WordPress on my shared hosting:
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/brechtryckaert.com/lrKeVkGC/
This is the result without Varnish/Redis/Memcached/RAMdisk addons, but I am using WP Super Cache here.
Other plugins running here are:
- Koko Analytics
- Newsletter, SMTP, Email marketing and Subscribe forms by Sendinblue
- Wordfence Security
- Yoast SEO