Shared Hosting Is a Scam and the People Who Sell It Should Be in Jail

I don't have a clean thesis here. Just spite. The kind of spite that ferments in the gut of a man who has spent twenty years watching the same grift play out, watching the same small-souled men in the same small offices collect their small fees while the world rots around them. The kind of feelings that wake you up at 3am when you're trying to figure out why a client's site takes eleven seconds to load and you trace it back to the fact that they're sharing a server with four hundred other websites including, I am not making this up, a forum for people who collect decorative spoons.

The spoon collectors are not the problem. The spoon collectors are just trying to live their lives and discuss spoons. The problem is the shared hosting company that sold my client "unlimited everything" for $3.99 a month and then put them on a server with the spoon people and also a cryptocurrency forum and also what I'm pretty sure is an abandoned Joomla installation from 2009 that's being used as a botnet node. Four hundred souls, crammed together on a humming box in a closet somewhere, their fates bound together like serfs on an estate owned by a man who has never seen it and does not care to.

The Pitch

Here's what shared hosting companies sell you: cheap. That's the pitch. That's the whole pitch. Three ninety-nine a month. Four ninety-nine. Sometimes they get crazy and charge seven dollars. For this price, they tell you, you get a website. Your website will be on the internet. People can visit it. You're in business, baby.

The men who write this copy, the men who design these landing pages with their cheerful gradients and their stock photos of smiling entrepreneurs - these men know exactly what they are doing. They have made a study of hope. They have learned to package it, to portion it out in $3.99 increments, to sell it to people who have no way of knowing they are being sold sawdust.

And technically, technically, this is true. Your website will be on the internet. In the same way that a tent in a Walmart parking lot is "housing." The tent is standing. Rain mostly doesn't get in. You can sleep there. Housing!

And the man who sold you the tent, he sleeps well at night. He has convinced himself that he has done you a service. He has given you shelter, has he not? What ingratitude, to complain. What monstrous ingratitude.

What they don't tell you, what they bury in the terms of service that nobody reads, is that you're sharing resources with hundreds of other websites. You're all on the same server. You're all using the same CPU, the same RAM, the same bandwidth. When the spoon forum gets a traffic spike because someone posted a rare vintage ladle, your website slows down. When the crypto bros start mining or whatever it is they do, your website slows down. When the Joomla botnet wakes up and starts sending spam, your website slows down.

Your website slows down a lot, is what I'm saying. It slows down because somewhere in this arrangement, someone decided that your business and the spoon collectors and the crypto enthusiasts and the botnet were all worth exactly the same amount: nothing. You are all equally worthless to the man collecting the $3.99. You are all equally a line item. A rounding error with a dream.

The Reality

I have spent, and I calculated this once when I was feeling sorry for myself, approximately fifteen percent of my professional career dealing with problems that are caused entirely by shared hosting. Fifteen percent. That's years of my life. Years I will not get back. Years spent in the service of cleaning up after men who would not deign to look me in the eye, men who have built empires on the backs of the confused and the hopeful, men who have never once had to explain to a weeping cupcake baker why her website doesn't work. Years spent explaining to clients that the reason their site loads slowly is not because of anything they did, not because of their content, not because of their code, but because they are paying four dollars a month for hosting and four dollars a month buys you a time-share on a computer that's also running a spoon forum.

Do you know how many hours I've spent optimizing sites that didn't need to be optimized? Sites that would have loaded fine, loaded great even, if they were on a server that wasn't also hosting a cryptocurrency forum and an abandoned Joomla installation? The client pays me to make their site faster. I do everything right. I compress the images. I minify the JavaScript. I defer the non-critical CSS. I do all the things I wrote about in Piston-Driven SEO. And the site still loads in four seconds because the server is garbage. The server is a 2015 Dell sitting in a closet in Phoenix, Arizona, caked in dust, running so hot you could fry an egg on it, wheezing like a consumptive clerk in a Gogol story. The air conditioning broke six months ago. Nobody fixed it. To fix it would require spending money, and the entire edifice of shared hosting is built on the principle that money flows in one direction only: upward, into pockets that are never full enough, belonging to men who are never satisfied.

The Wedding Venue Problem

You know what shared hosting reminds me of? Wedding venues. Not in the sense that anyone is getting married on a shared server, although honestly at four dollars a month I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried. No, I mean in the sense that it's an industry built entirely on extracting money from people who don't know any better.

Wedding venues are a scam. The entire wedding industry is a scam. You take a normal thing, a party, and you add the word "wedding" to it, and suddenly everything costs four times as much. The flowers cost more. The cake costs more. The venue that would charge you two thousand dollars for a corporate event charges you eight thousand dollars for a wedding. Same room. Same chairs. Same everything. But you said the word "wedding" and now everyone's hand is in your pocket. The florist. The caterer. The photographer. The venue owner with his sweating face and his too-tight suit, who has learned that love is a commodity and sentimentality is a weakness to be exploited. These people have looked into the human heart and seen only a wallet.

Shared hosting is like that, except in reverse. Instead of charging you more for the same thing, they charge you less for a worse thing. They charge you four dollars for something that looks like hosting but isn't really hosting, not in any meaningful sense. It's the appearance of hosting. It's hosting-flavored. Your site is technically on the internet, in the same way that a wedding at the county clerk's office is technically a wedding.

But here's where the comparison breaks down, and this is what I keep going back and forth on: wedding venues are expensive. They're a scam because they're expensive. Shared hosting is cheap. It's four dollars. What do you want for four dollars?

What Do You Want for Four Dollars

This is what keeps me up at night. Shared hosting is so cheap that complaining about it feels like complaining about the food at a soup kitchen. What did you expect? You paid four dollars. You got four dollars worth of hosting. The math works out.

This is what they want you to think. This is the genius of it, the beautiful, horrible genius. They have constructed a system where the victim blames himself. Where the man who has been cheated walks away thinking, well, I should have known better. I should have paid more. The fault is mine. The fault is always mine.

Except it doesn't. Because the shared hosting company didn't sell you "four dollars worth of hosting." They sold you "unlimited bandwidth" and "unlimited storage" and "99.9% uptime" and "blazing fast servers." They sold you a lie. They told you that four dollars would buy you something good, and then they gave you something bad, and then when you complained they pointed to the terms of service and said actually, technically, according to paragraph 47 subsection B, "unlimited" means "limited" and "blazing fast" means "whatever we feel like" and "99.9% uptime" doesn't count scheduled maintenance or unscheduled maintenance or maintenance we forgot to schedule or times when the server caught fire.

So it's not that you got what you paid for. It's that you got less than what you paid for. You paid four dollars for something they told you was good and you got something that is actively bad. You got a website that loads in eleven seconds. You got a website that goes down every time the spoon forum has a meetup. You got a website that Google looks at and says, you know what, I'm not going to crawl this, this is too slow, this is not worth my time. Your redline is so low that a single Googlebot visit tips you over the edge.

And then you call me. And I have to explain to you that your hosting is garbage and you need to spend more money. And you look at me like I'm trying to upsell you, like I'm the wedding venue trying to charge you extra for the chairs, when really I'm just trying to get you out of the Walmart parking lot and into an actual house.

The Chain of Misery

Here's what shared hosting actually creates. A chain of misery. A daisy chain of small degradations, each one leading to the next, each one enriching someone who will never know your name.

Small business owner wants a website. They don't know anything about websites. Why would they? They sell plumbing supplies or bake cupcakes or whatever. They go to Google, they type "how to make a website," and Google tells them to get hosting. They look at hosting. They see that real hosting costs thirty, forty, fifty dollars a month. They see that shared hosting costs four dollars. They think, well, I'm just a small business, I don't need the fancy stuff, four dollars is fine.

So they buy the four dollar hosting. They put up their website. The website is slow. They don't know it's slow, because they don't know what fast looks like. They think this is just how websites are. They get no traffic from Google because Google doesn't want to send people to slow websites. They think, well, I guess I need SEO. They hire an SEO person. The SEO person, me, shows up and says your hosting is garbage. They say, but I just paid for hosting. I say, yes, but it's garbage. They say, how can it be garbage, I'm paying for it. I say, you're paying four dollars. They say, so? I say, so you're on a server with a spoon forum.

They can't understand, and why should they? They sell plumbing supplies. They got into plumbing supplies because their father sold plumbing supplies, or because they liked the simplicity of it, the honesty of it - a pipe is a pipe, a fitting is a fitting, the thing either leaks or it doesn't. They don't know what a server is. They don't know what shared means. They just know they paid money for a thing and the thing doesn't work and now I'm telling them to pay more money for a different thing and they're starting to wonder if the whole internet is a scam designed to extract money from small business owners.

They're not entirely wrong. I wrote about this same pattern in the piece about the Helpful Content Update-the way systems are designed to take your money first and reveal the problems later.

Who Benefits

The shared hosting company benefits. Obviously. They're charging four dollars a month to hundreds of thousands of customers. They're spending almost nothing on infrastructure because the whole point is to cram as many websites as possible onto as few servers as possible. They're making money hand over fist.

Who else benefits? I do. I benefit. I get paid to fix problems that shared hosting creates. If everyone was on decent hosting from the start, I'd have fifteen percent fewer clients. Maybe more. A significant chunk of my income comes from explaining to people that their four dollar hosting is why their website doesn't work.

Doesn't feel good. It feels like being a doctor who benefits from the cigarette industry. It feels like being complicit in something shameful. Sure, I'm helping people, but the help wouldn't be necessary if the problem didn't exist, and the problem only exists because someone is making money creating the problem.

The small business owner doesn't benefit. They paid four dollars for garbage, then they paid me to tell them it's garbage, then they paid thirty dollars for real hosting, then they paid me again to migrate everything. They spent more money than if they'd just bought real hosting from the start. They lost months of potential traffic while their garbage site was being garbage. They're worse off than if shared hosting didn't exist.

And somewhere, in an office park in Tempe or a WeWork in Austin, a man is looking at a spreadsheet and he is smiling. He is smiling because the numbers are good. The numbers are always good. The numbers don't know about the cupcake baker. The numbers don't care.

I Don't Know

I told you I don't have a clean thesis. Should shared hosting be illegal? Probably not. It's not technically fraud. They do provide hosting. It's just bad hosting. You can't make it illegal to sell bad things. Half the economy would collapse.

Should the people who sell it be in jail? No, obviously not. That was hyperbole. They should maybe feel bad about themselves. They should maybe lie awake at night thinking about all the small businesses they've hobbled with their garbage servers. But jail is too far.

Should you use shared hosting? No. God, no. Please. I'm begging you. Spend the extra twenty-five dollars a month. Get real hosting. Get a VPS. Get something, anything, that doesn't involve sharing a server with a spoon forum. Your website will load faster. Google will like you more. I'll have one less client to explain things to. Read the technical SEO guide if you want to know what actually matters.

Actually, wait. If you use shared hosting, call me. I could use the money.

We are all, in the end, selling something to someone. The shared hosting company sells lies to the hopeful. I sell truth to the disappointed. The only difference is that I have the decency to feel bad about it.

Or maybe that's not a difference at all. Maybe that's just another thing I tell myself so I can sleep at night.