Do you rely on a shared hosting service for your website? This is a great option for the small business starting their first website, but not so great if your site receives a lot of traffic. There are numerous other sites relying on the same server, which can lead to downtime.
Do you know who you are sharing the servers with? Here is a handy shared hosting tips, that allows you to find out what other websites are using the same resources as you that might be leading to problems in the performance of your website.
Problems With Shared Hosting
A large number of small businesses, personal websites, and blogs choose shared hosting due to its low price and variety of features. As long as you don't generate a ton of traffic, this hosting solution should work well for you.
The problems arise when the resources are being demanded by too many sites at the same time. This shouldn't happen if you have a host with a brain. They're pretty good at preventing this problem in the first place.
If you find your site is seeing a major increase in traffic, you might want to rethink your hosting solution to avoid downtime.
How To Find Websites On Your Shared Server
There a couple of easy ways to determine other websites that share your server. The handy tool uses the IP address, which will be the same for all the sites hosted on that server, to compile the list. So all you need is the domain name to discover all the sites hosted by that server.
- Go to YouGetSignal. Enter your domain name or IP address into the text box and click “Check.” Results will appear, listing every website hosted on the same server as your site. The tool will tell you additional information, such as websites with questionable content that could be leading to your site's poor performance. All questionable content sites are marked in red.
- You can also use Bing, Microsoft's answer to Google, to do the same thing. It takes a little bit more work, but returns the same results. Open the command prompt on your computer and type ‘ping http://www.yoursite.com'. This will display that site's IP address. Copy it to your clipboard, head to Bing, and type ‘ip:paste the IP copied to your clipboard here' into the search box. A list will be displayed with all of the other domains hosted on the same server.
What To Do With This Information
So you've searched, and determined there are a plethora of sites sharing the servers, competing for memory. If you are experiencing site slowdowns or loading problems and you are sharing the server with thousands of other domains, it might be time to rethink your hosting situation.
Each hosting company will be different: Go Daddy loads the websites onto the server, sometimes up to 6,000 other domains, while a company like HostGator only a few hundred.
If Your site is steadily increasing its users, it's probably time to reconsider your shared hosting situation. Shared hosting may be a good place to start, but if you are a small business starting out that grows as it should, you ideally won't be with shared hosting forever.
