Big Hosting Problems: Why Shared Hosting is Bad

Quick 2026 note before we get into it: If you landed here because your site is slow or down and you’re on a shared plan, the timing is rough. About a third of all HTTP requests are now automated bots, per Cloudflare Radar, and AI training crawlers are the fastest-growing slice of that. They hammer pages in bulk, no patience, no backoff, and they land directly on the server resources your WordPress is already sharing with 50 other tenants. If you’ve outgrown shared hosting and are trying to figure out what comes next, that’s what this page is for. The problem documented in this post from 2018 hasn’t gone away. It got noisier.

You may recall when we first got setup, we were using Namecheap, and things were great. Well, after a while, we started having issues with their managed WordPress service, EasyWP. After we had suffered enough outages with them, we moved to Dreamhost on the recommendation of Big Guy Damien. You may remember the Big Guy New Digs post where I documented this process. While Dreamhost does have a nice interface and comes in somewhere in the middle on price, we have had way too many issues with them.

When I signed up with them, I went with their shared hosting option because the site really didn’t need a lot of resources at the time, and I figured we could always scale up or migrate off to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) in the future if we needed to. Boy, did I find out the hard way that this was a pipe dream.

This post is less about bashing Dreamhost, and more about discussing how shared hosting works, why shared hosting is bad, and what you can do if you are caught up in a bad shared server situation. They are probably a great company, and we may just be an edge case, but I wanted to put this out there in case others start getting as frustrated as I did.

Update (2026): Where I Eventually Landed

This post is from 2018, and a fair number of things have changed since I wrote it. If you’re here trying to decide what to do after outgrowing shared hosting, I want to give you the honest short version first, then you can read the war story below.

I went from Dreamhost’s shared hosting to DigitalOcean. At the time, that felt like the obvious next step for someone with a server background. And honestly, for me, it made sense. But that path assumes you’re comfortable in a terminal. Most people aren’t, and that’s fine. My current setup is Hostinger handling the WordPress frontend plus a DigitalOcean VM running the pipeline side. Not one thing, two things working together, each doing what it does well.

If you want the full breakdown of why I landed where I did and what each piece of the stack actually does, I wrote it all up: my actual hosting stack breakdown. And if you’ve been thinking about the DIY route, I also built out a guide for that: building a Linux home server for under $200. Both are worth a read depending on which direction you’re leaning.

How Shared Hosting Works

If you’re reading this, you probably landed here while doing research on the topic, maybe you are curious to know how shared hosting works, or maybe you are having similar issues. For those who may not know, shared hosting is where a provider, like Dreamhost, takes one server (more likely a lot of servers), and they put multiple users on the machine. Now, these servers aren’t your normal machine running one, maybe multi-core, CPU with a bit of RAM.

From what I recall, the server I was on had 8 or 16 cores and several hundred gigs of RAM, so the server was a beast. Honestly, most websites, especially blogs just starting out, do not require a fraction of the resources that a server like this will use anyway.

The Pitch: What Shared Hosting Plans Offer

After they build out that enterprise-class server, they start loading it up with users who need to host their digital things on the internet. Most hosting providers have a shared hosting option and offer similar packages. Using Dreamhost as an example, they make the following claims on their shared hosting package. When you “set your website up for success with shared hosting” through Dreamhost, you will enjoy a speedy, scalable, simple, and secure experience. One which comes with “Unlimited Websites”, WordPress Pre-installs, Top Flight Tech Support, and Incredibly fast SSD Hosting among other things. You can get all of this for as low as $7.95 a month if you pay for three years up front (which we did).

The Reality: What Shared Hosting Providers Do with These Huge Hosting Servers

The web hosting market is pretty saturated. Just go Google it yourself, and you will find a plethora of companies offering similar services, so it is probably pretty hard to make good money off of doing this now. What ends up happening is the provider over-allocates the servers they run. The server I was on had probably 50+ users on it, and I believe it had just as many virtual network interfaces/IPs.

Each of the server’s IPs was also hosting several sites. Using Bing search for a reverse IP lookup (which is about the only thing Bing is good for) provides 3400 results for the IP that the Big Guy on Stuff site was running on until yesterday. All of these results are not individual sites, but just skimming through the pages, I have counted 18 unique domains.

Why Shared Hosting is Bad

You have probably already pieced this together by now, but let’s get into why shared hosting is bad. The sales folks have done a good job letting us know how it “should” work, and honestly, how awesome would it be if it did work that way? We would have way less waste because servers would be utilized to the fullest, and everyone on the server would receive top-notch hosting.

Unfortunately, the shine starts wearing off as soon as you get going on your new shared server. The problems started out slow as Big Guy on Stuff was ramping up. Occasionally I would notice that some of my pages were showing browser errors (400 and 500 errors for those who know HTML error codes). I would poke around, and eventually the problem would go away. I would find out that Dreamhost has a watchdog script running that tries to police the shared environment which kills off user processes that are abusing the system resources.

Sheriff Daemon

This watchdog process, we’ll call him Sheriff Daemon, sounded great. It was going to make sure that all of the parties on the shared host were playing within the limits. The only problem is, Daemon started killing off Big Guy on Stuff processes for supposedly using too much RAM. Now, our user base here at Big Guy on Stuff has been growing every month, but we have nowhere near the amount of traffic that would use its fair share of resources on that server. I also noticed along the way that the server’s CPU load kept spiking.

Th CPU load is a number that the server reports out as how busy it’s CPU is. This number is somewhat complex, but it mostly boils down to a percentage of CPU usages times the number of cores you have. So, if you have a single core CPU, a load of 1.0 is actually bad as that processor is being heavily utilized. I mentioned earlier that the server had 8 or 16 cores. During some of our “events”, I would see the CPU load spike up to 80+ which is way too high. During these times, the site was slow, and I could hardly even login to the server back-end myself.

Top Flight Tech Support

So, this section is probably the only part of this post where it may get a little rough for Dreamhost. I’m sure a lot of companies have this same problem though. They claim that they have “Top Flight Tech Support”.

Every time I opened a ticket with them, they always pointed me to articles on the internet on how to reduce the number of plugins that my WordPress site was using. I optimized the site so much over the last couple of months just trying to please Sheriff Daemon to no avail. Time and time again, I would open a case, and time and time again they would say that Daemon killed off my processes for “using too much RAM”.

Well, how much RAM am I able to use so that maybe I can adjust the system to play within the bounds of the law. Oh, they can’t tell you this because it is proprietary and would cause a security issue. OK. So, you provide this “unlimited” service, you got Sheriff Daemon out there protecting the digital citizens, but the law he enforces is not published. I opened many, many tickets on this and the CPU load issue.

They never really addressed the CPU load issue or acknowledged that it might have been way oversubscribed. One time they said they “removed the offending user”, and a time or two they owned up to a server issue. Even worse, I felt like all they were trying to do with shared hosting was trying to bully people in to upgrading to their VPS service as every time I had an issue, that was ALWAYS suggested that I may need to go to VPS.

The Middle Path Nobody Talks About

OK so you’ve outgrown shared hosting. That’s clear. But here’s where most posts leave you hanging: they assume the next step is a VPS, which means setting up Nginx, managing SSL renewals, babysitting server updates, and generally spending your Saturday debugging something that was working fine on Tuesday. That’s not a step up for most people. That’s a whole new job.

There’s actually a middle tier worth knowing about: managed WordPress platforms. These are not the same as shared hosting. They’re purpose-built for WordPress specifically, usually running on cloud infrastructure with actual resource isolation between accounts. The hosts worth knowing about in this space are Kinsta (starts around $35/month for a single site), WP Engine (around $30/month at the entry tier), and Hostinger’s Business WordPress plan, which sits closer to $15-20/month on an annual billing cycle.

If I’m being honest, “managed WordPress” covers a wide range of quality. The budget end is still closer to shared than it sounds. The difference you’re actually paying for at Kinsta or WP Engine is genuine container isolation, Google Cloud or AWS infrastructure underneath, and support that actually knows WordPress rather than pointing you at generic documentation. The price jump from $3-5/month shared to $20-35/month managed is real. Whether it’s worth it depends entirely on what your site’s downtime actually costs you.

What About EasyWP If You Searched “EasyWP Down”?

If you landed here by searching “easywp down,” you’re probably in the middle of something right now. I have some history with EasyWP, which is Namecheap’s managed WordPress product and where this blog lived before Dreamhost. The short version: EasyWP had documented reliability problems through 2022 and 2023. Trustpilot reviews from that period are full of reports about extended outages, sites going dark for hours with no communication, and support sending the same copy-paste reply regardless of the actual issue. The pattern was consistent enough that it wasn’t a one-off edge case.

EasyWP’s current pricing starts around $10-14/month monthly (cheaper on annual), which puts it below Kinsta and WP Engine on both price and uptime guarantees. If you need a committed uptime SLA, Kinsta and WP Engine both publish theirs clearly. EasyWP’s Supersonic tier lists 99.99% uptime now, which is better than it was, but that SLA is only on their top plan. Check which plan you’re actually on before counting on it.

The real pro tip here: if you’re stuck in an EasyWP outage right now, their support chat is faster than tickets. And once you’re back up, take an afternoon to think about whether this is the third time this has happened. Because if it is, you already know what to do.

In conclusion: Shared Hosting. Don’t Do It!

Unless you are really just running a site that has a couple pages that never change, with no back-end database and no user engagement, I would recommend to stay away from shared hosting. It sounds fantastic, and the price is a little easier on the wallet, but the problems that come with it are not worth your time. I recommend doing some research on VPS providers so that you at least “virtually” have your own system. Or, if you want full control, you can even build your own Linux home server for under $200.

After my research, and on another recommendation from a friend, I landed on Digitalocean for the new Big Guy on Stuff home. I’ll write more on the experience I’ve had with Digitalocean after I’ve been up and running for a while. Right off the bat, I will say that the experience I’ve had as a network/server administrator for 13 years has helped out tremendously in the move as they are not quite as “easy button” as Dreamhost, but the experience has been amazing so far. The site is more responsive than it ever has been. Oh yeah, and the system resources are barely being utilized, as I suspected. Take that Sheriff Daemon.

Call to Action

Have any of you folks had similar experiences? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Or, drop me a line via the contact form. I still have stickers to give out!