If You Are Using Shared Hosting – You Are Already Losing Money

This is a very bold statement, but likely very true! – “If You Are Using Shared Hosting – You Are Already Losing Money”

For the longest of times people have been trying to get by with paying minimal for hosting, many use a simple shared hosting account on a service like Hostgator. This can be ok if you are running a small amount of traffic, once you start getting more traffic, you really should consider upgrading to at least a VPS (we recommend LiquidWeb or BeyondHosting).

What is the difference? Many people don’t know! With shared hosting, there is a central server, generally hosting companies try to do their best to maximize profit and put as many hosting accounts as they can on the 1 server. Think of this like a 5 lane highway, but everyone shares it, you get no priority. With a VPS, think of it like a 5 lane highway, but 1 of the lanes is dedicated to you – only traffic to your sites can use 1 of the lanes. The other 4 are for everyone else, but you at least have your own lane. With a dedicated server, you have all 5 lanes for you, no one else can use them. For most people, a VPS is more than sufficient.

Hopefully by now you can see why shared hosting might not be the best choice, especially if you are running paid traffic.

A while ago I performed a little test, I wanted to see the difference first hand between shared hosting and a VPS. For my shared hosting, I used Hostgator, for the VPS I used BeyondHosting. To perform this test, I decided to send $10 worth of PPV traffic to each host and see what happened. I used Lead Impact, for a tracker, for this test I used Prosper202, I also used Awstats to help look at server logs to help get an accurate representation. I also used a small simple landing page.

 

Shared Hosting

Impressions According to Lead Impact: 577
Landing Page Impressions/Loads according to Prosper202: 92
Awstats (number of impressions according to raw logs): 490

VPS Hosting

Impressions According to Lead Impact: 593
Landing Page Impressions/Loads according to Prosper202: 558
Awstats (number of impressions according to raw logs): 564

 

Interesting numbers? Let’s see how they stacked up.

For Shared Hosting, we sent 577 people to the landing page. The landing page only fully loaded for 92 people. We paid for 577 people, we only received 92, this means we spent money on 485 impressions that didn’t even reach our landing page! This is an 84% drop, only 3 out of every 20 people will see our landing page, even with a 100% CTR, there is no way we can make money off this! Awstats reported 490 impressions, my assumption is the traffic made it to my hosting, but failed to load the landing page (or at least failed to load it in time).

For VPS Hosting, we sent 593 people to the same landing page (it was the same landing page, just hosting on the VPS site opposed to the shared hosting), the landing page loaded for 558 people. We did have a little bit of a click loss (we paid for 35 people who did not make it to the landing page). This is a 6% drop, much less than shared hosting!

So, do you still think Shared hosting is enough? I hope now, I really hope that you consider looking into a VPS.