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Shared Hosting

From wikipedia:

A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service refers to a web hosting service where multiple websites reside on one web server. Each site “sits” on its own partition, or section/place on the server to keep it separate from other sites. This is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.

Some of the challenges of running Perl web applications on shared hosting are:

  • Restrictions on what software you can install – you may be stuck with whatever version of Perl is already installed
  • Resource limits – do processes get killed if they consume too much memory and/or cpu time?
  • Acceptable Use Policies – assuming you overcome all the technical hurdles, is your provider happy with you running that program on their server?
  • Shared Apache – most shared hosting accounts use a shared Apache installation across all accounts on the server, with limited configuration available via cPanel. This puts considerable limitations on the types of web apps you can deploy.

On top of that, all of the normal negatives about using shared hosting still apply. For instance, if another user abuses their account (intentionally or otherwise) your sites will suffer. e.g. the server may become overloaded, the IP address might get spam blacklisted, etc..

If your website cannot afford to suffer random outages that are completely out of your control, then you almost certainly don’t want to be using shared hosting.

However many websites do not fall into the above category. For example if you have a fun little idea that you want to put online, or a non mission-critical website, or a non-existent budget, then shared hosting is often exactly what you want.