The tip of the day comes from continued frustration that a lot of site owners still want to have the most, the best, the fastest, without paying for it. And then realize they got what they paid for and can’t backup, can’t move, can’t do anything. Because they did not take their property serious enough to invest into a VPS or better hosting plan.
With shared hosting you pay a little bit, compared to say a $2500 per month dedicated hosting solution. But, it’s not what you want.
Why?
Because you are just one user on a server with potentially hundreds of users. All sharing the same CPU, all sharing the same RAM, all sharing the same HDD, and all sharing the same Bandwidth. If one of them uses poorly and insecure coded software, they might cause the server to get hacked, they might cause the server to crawl to its knees. Taking your site with it.
Another why is that you are just a ‘user’ on a user-level, no administrative permissions that a super-user might have. Sure, through control panels you can do a bit. And sure, through the control panel you can back up.
But what if your site grows faster than expected? Suddenly the restrictions and limits you have enforced on you might cause you to be unable to make a complete backup, might suddenly have you realize that you don’t have shell access to do a MySQL dump to the file system.
Or even worse, your eat too much CPU/RAM/HDD/Bandwidth and the hosting provider automatically suspends your site because it’s affecting the other accounts on the server. They rather see you gone, than lose 25 other customers who complain their site is slow.
No, shared hosting has no benefits unless you’re just really cheap person, and you don’t care that you run these risks, or don’t care that you might lose all your data at one point.
What you really want if you are serious about your web site is to be in control as much as possible. The VPS plans is where it all starts. For a tiny bit more you can get access as super-user to an account on a server that’s being used by only a handful of other users. You get the resources you pay for, and you get more drive quota, and more bandwidth available to you. Not to mention you get shell access where you can do a lot more with direct access.
Backing up using crontab suddenly becomes an easy task, and dumping to the file system with MySQL ensures you that your .sql dumps are completed and not running into timeouts, etc. Restoring a backup is a breeze, and not limited to your internet connection.
Do yourself a favor, upgrade your shared plan to a VPS (virtual private server) and invest in the quality, performance, stability of your web site. And start making regular backups. It helps you avoid costs, like having to pay me every time your shared hosting account causes yet another problem for your site.