Those fancy ads that we get during YouTube videos or while scrolling through ads says that the hosting service that they provide are like unlimited storage, in some cases that they guarentee for unlimited websites.
Most hosting companies mention for unlimited storage and unlimited websites but they limit you in other ways that makes you not capable of creating unlimited websites like for example by inodes or by other things but there are some websites that allows you unlimited as they say.
I wanted to create this blog and I am not used to these shared hosting. I mostly prefer the vps hosting or cloud hosting.
They cost per month on the basis of the usage per month. I have made some blogs but I made that also with vps hosting. So I never used shared hosting before this blog.
When I wanted to create this blog I wanted to try out shared hosting. I got four hosting in my mind.
- Dreamhost (My favourite)
- Bluehost
- Hostinger
- Siteground
I have tried all the four of them and here is my reviews and the thing I will share here was not openly said anywhere while I researched.
I went through a lot of articles and I went through a lot of youtube videos and stuff but trust me everyone mentioned that they provide unlimited and no limitations and stuff.
Everything that they mentioned is not true and the reason they are not telling us the truth is that they get a bulk amount when you sign up for a hosting.
Like from 50$ to 100$ in normal shared hosting. So they just want to get you to buy it. Now from all the experiences that I have learned I am going to tell you everything.
Should you use shared hosting.
Obviously it's cheap and easier to setup than a vps hosting and also most has automated backups and alot more.
Here are the things most hosting providers gives you.
- Nice UI to setup website
- Automated backups or one tap backups
- Email hosting
- Free SSL certificates
- Free domain
- Cronjobs
- FTP Account
- Some sites provide site builders
I love all these things and I wanted to try it out once. And I bought in all the four of them for testing and reviewing.
Before getting started.
So before going to the reviews I will share things you should know.
When I first started my shared hosting, that is when I know that the unlimited things promise that they provide is not true at all. It is limited and you will also know it.
These are the three things that will limit the unlimited capability.
- Inodes
- Bandwidth
- RAM Memory Limit
- CPU
Almost all of the hosting providers never mention these things in the homepage or even in full features section.
What is inodes?
Source : Elegant themes Image
It is the number of files and folders that you have inside your website. It seems simple right? yes it is but the issue is that this is a major limiting factor in case of storage.
I run a blog and it is a programming blog. So I need a lot of images for demonstrations and alot more for step by step tutorials. I have posted by now 12 posts and in average I use 13 pictures for every post.
Most hostinger providers provide you in average of 250,000 inodes which means you store 250,000 images technically because an image occupies 1 inodes.
Which says that I can post around 19,230 posts in my blog alone to reach the inodes capacity then I won't be able to post anymore but you won't be able to post that much because WordPress installation itself takes 5000+ inodes because it has more than 5000 files in wordpress folder.
So then if I create one site in my shared hosting with wordpress and I install 6 plugins and two themes because we usually install plugins and themes.
Then it will take 5,380 inodes for a average wordpress site that has no content on it and let's calculate how much posts now I can post
With this things I can post around 18,819 in the whole shared hosting but in reality people like me wants page to load fast. So we use image compression plugins and I use Ewww Image Optimizer.
It is really good one though. what they does is that it compresses the image and create 7 different file formats for the single image for different sizes of screen.
Now do you understand the problem, if I upload 7 images in my blog post then it will be compressed and will be having 8 different copies including the orginal image then for 13 images it will 104 image files but the file size will be really small because these are compressed ones right.
Now for every post it will take 104 inodes with this type I can only post 2,352. You can say this is a pretty decent amount of posts though right.
Yea it is even big blogs has only around these many posts only but the problem here is that for email accounts as well there are inodes count.
If you recieve a mail in your email account in the hosting provider it will take 1 inode and if you recieved a mail with an image or multimedia it will take in average of 3 inodes.
Nowadays all company emails that comes will have a logo attached to it or HTML files.
Let's calculate the real thing here.
| No Of Inodes | 250,000 |
| No Of Sites | 1 |
| No Of Inodes Per WordPress Installation | 5,000 |
| No Of Inodes Per Wordpress Plugin | 25 |
| No Of Inodes Per Wordpress Theme | 15 |
| No Of Inodes Per Mail Message | 1 |
| No Of Inodes Per Mail With Image Or Logo | 3 |
| No Of Inodes Per Image If you use Image compression plugin | 8 |
| No Of Images In Average Blog Post | 13 |
| No Of Inodes For Average Blog Post If you use image compression plugin | 104 |
| No Of Inodes For Average Blog Post without image compression plugin | 15 |
Let's calculate how much post can i post with the data that we collected. Shall we?
Let's say my blog is made with wordpress and I have 4 email accounts and each has 150 mails in it and most of them has images embedded and I have installed 12 plugins and 4 themes. I would like to calculate how much posts can I make.
| Total Inodes | 250,000 Inodes |
| WordPress Installation | 5000 Inodes |
| 12 Plugins | 12 25 = 300 Inodes |
| 4 Themes | 4 15 = 60 Inodes |
| 4 Emails With 150 mails each | 4 150 = 600 mails |
| 600 Mails With Images | 600 3 = 1800 Inodes |
| Remaining Inodes | 242,840 Inodes |
| Inodes Per Post | 104 Inodes |
| Total No Of Posts You Can Post | 2,335 Posts |
So, this is the total no of posts that you can post with a single site hosted in your shared hosting but they mentioned it is unlimited storage, Is it unlimited now?
As you can see clearly it's all a lie from the beginning that it has unlimited storage, Nope you are always limited. There are some hosting providers that provides unlimited inodes but we will come to it in the conclusion.
One last thing before concluding, in the case of VPS hosting there are no inode limits and I have also been hosting my blog in VPS server only it is a little cost expensive then shared hosting.
But the cost isn't the matter, it is harder to setup and maintain unless you're a little technical but I do have a solution for you all at the end of the post
What is bandwidth?
Souce: Artistic Programmer CloudFlare Dashboard.
So, when you type in a URL in your browser it will ask for the static files like HTML, CSS, and JS. Which will render the site in your browser.
The size of the three files in Mega bytes is the bandwidth. As you can see the bandwidth usage of my blog is 833 MB. It is very little compared to the traffic of our website.
We received about 60.15k requests last month alone. Most of the time bandwidth isn't a problem at all unless you are streaming a video from your hosting service itself instead of platform's like youtube.
Which significantly increases your bandwidth and some hosting providers doesn't provide unlimited bandwidth then your site won't be available online or will be served to other visitors.
But most of the people this is not an issue at all like you are not going to start the next netflix from a shared hosting.
How does RAM Memory limit affects?
We all know what RAM is, to the ones who doesn't know what RAM is. You can use it for background processes to be stored while other processes are happening.
In simple words the more RAM you have the better your server or laptop will do better at multi-tasking.
The trick the hosting providers do is that they will mostly never mention the configuration of the hosting service that you will receive.
Only after buying it only you will find out how much RAM is there in your instance or your hosting service mostly you will have about
Half a gigabyte which means 500 MB of RAM. It seems a lot small but for a web server it is okay to have 500 MB. But the question is here is
With this half a gigabyte RAM can you host unlimited site? On an for every visitor or requests you have it will take about 40 MB of RAM in a second.
If you have 500 MB of RAM then you will only be able to have 13 requests per second but that's not the case though because that's really too low.
What we do is that we will have caching implemented and CDN's as well from cloudflare which significantly boosts your no of requests from 13 to 50 or even 100 requests per second.
This really limits your capability to create and hold multiple sites at the time. So, now you can see why you can't have multiple sites at the same time.
If your hosting provider has given you with 1 giga byte of RAM. then how much websites will I be able to host?
It depends on the scale of the website but I can give you some reference. If every site you upload has 500K Monthly Visit then you can have about 4 Sites like that.
If your site has around 50K monthly visits then you can have about 10 such sites or even 15 such sites it depends on some other factors.
How does CPU limits your capability?
This is the CPU usage of my site. Currently my site receives about 60.15K requests per month. For your information my blog is hosted in VPS hosting.
It mostly never crosses even above 10% like 7% is the ideal use of my blog. From my calculations my blog can handle up to 1 Million requests per month or even higher than that.
But for the most of you, you might have a shared hosting and it might have 5 or 6 Sites.
How much does requests each one of the site can handle if my CPU is 1 core?
It varies alot again based on the plugins and your caching system but I can give you a formula by which you can calculate it.
(number of CPU cores / Average Page Response Time in seconds) * 60 * User Click Frequency in seconds = Maximum simultaneous users
So if you could use this formula to calculate the no of requests, let's say the website shared hosting provider gives you 1 cores and on average the response time is 200ms. then you can find the no of users that you can have in a single core processor.
On average you will have average requests per website if you had only one website and it means it can have on average of 900 Users simultaneously.
That's awesome though but the problem here is that you can't host multiple site with that much of active users.
That's the problem with their promise they limit you in such ways.
Reviews On Top Hosting Site.
Here are my reviews on the shared hosting plans in these platforms, and I will tell you which one I think is the best among them,
We will all need hosting service at some point, so shared hosting are really cheap and anyone can afford it and moreover they can use it really easily.
So, which one should you among these four hosting providers.
- Hostinger
- Siteground
- DreamHost
- BlueHost
Let me brief you about the advantages of each of them and my experience with each of them. I am mentioned everything seriously and it is not a copy paste of reviews.
Hostinger
They are the cheapest in the marketplace and their UI for the Cpanel was amazing it was not technical at all, like even a dumb person can learn it quickly
I am used to the Cpanel, So it was a little different for me to use the interface though. But I liked it alot and it was really clean, minimal and easier to use.
Coming to the service, I am not satisfied with the service they provided like it was not bad I would say More of like 4 out of 10 and they only provide 250,000 inodes in the premium plan and you all know how less it that.
The customer support took about 45 minutes to reply but they guarenteed that it will be in 20 minutes or it will be under 30 minutes but I had to wait for a long time.
Their customer support overall is not bad at all the time it took to connect me is really long that's the only issue.
They do have a lot of limitations and their not providing free ssl certificate, they try to sell you something always.
| Criteria | Rating (Out of 5) | Comments |
| UI | 5 | This is the best UI that I have used and it is really sleek, minimal and feels good to use. |
| Ease Of Use | 4.8 | Most of the time everything is easy except doing certain stuffs. |
| Email Hosting | 5 | The email hosting is also easier like the UI but you are limited to create only 100 emails per domain |
| Databases | 5 | You can create unlimited databases, and it is limited to 5GB per database. |
| Applications | 5 | There are alot of variety of choices that you can choose from for you website. |
| Bandwidth | 5 | It is unmetered. Awesome |
| No of websites | 4.5 | You are limited to only create 100 websites for every hosting. |
| Backups | 5 | It is awesome that you can easily make the backups in the dashboard with one click |
| Refunds | 4.6 | They are quick at processing your refunds and it is transferred in instance but the duration for refund is 30 days. There are hosting providers provide 120 days even. |
| Caching | 5 | They are providing openlitespeed caching in-build which is awesome |
| Speed | 4.9 | It is really so faster in most cases except it sometimes it takes a little longer for responding. |
| CDN | 4.6 | They do not have their own CDN but they have pre installed Cloudflare. |
| Uptime | 4.7 | They do have an Okayish uptime guarentee of 99.9% but still they could provide more. |
| Customer Support | 4.6 | The time taken alone is a little longer but they supporting people are awesome |
| Overall | 4.4 | I love everything in this except the no of inodes that you are allotted it is really too low |
Bluehost
They are really awesome trust me but the price is a little higher considering the hostinger, and the renewal cost is also a little higher if you only bought it for a year.
They are one of the recommended the hosting providers by wordpress, it is really a big thing.
They provide a free domain that you can avail once you bought the package above basic but the renewal cost of the domain is a little pricey here.
Everything here is just great as they mentioned but they always show you a sales pitch to make you feel wanting more just like Hostinger.
They provide a easier to use ssl certicates for free unlimited with letsencrypt. it is awesome.
They do also have their own custom cpanel and it is good but not as much hostinger.
| Criteria | Rating (Out of 5) | Comments |
| UI | 4.8 | They do have their own custom cpanel and it is great but not to the level of hostinger. |
| Ease Of Use | 4.7 | It is a little complicated when you want to do advanced optimizations. |
| Email Hosting | 5 | The email hosting is also easier like the UI but you are limited to send only 500 emails per hour |
| Databases | 5 | You can create unlimited databases, and it is limited to 5GB per database. |
| Applications | 5 | There are alot of variety of choices that you can choose from for you website. |
| Bandwidth | 5 | It is unmetered. Awesome |
| No of websites | 5 | You can create unlimited no of websites. |
| Backups | 4.8 | It is a little harder to do the backups but once you get the flow it is easy. |
| Refunds | 4.6 | They are quick at processing your refunds and it is transferred in instance but the duration for refund is 30 days. There are hosting providers provide 120 days even. |
| Caching | None | They do not have their own caching setup |
| Speed | 4.5 | It is not fast in the response time between pages, maybe if they have openlitespeed cache it would be way faster |
| CDN | 4.6 | They do not have their own CDN but they have pre installed Cloudflare. |
| Uptime | None | They do not provide any uptime guarenteees |
| Customer Support | 4.8 | They are really nice and helpful |
| Overall | 4.5 | Awesome service but a little to pricey for a new blogger to start considering the alternatives. |
Siteground
Their UI is really confusing to get started and I don't know whether is that the case for everyone,
The pricing of this site is way higher for the service that they are providing, you could just choose other hosting providers and they are not providing anything special.
They also do have their own inodes limit, which limits you from using the complete 40GB storage.
I won't recommend this hosting service provider at all, you could just change it to the any other one than this, I am saying from the experience.
| Criteria | Rating (Out of 5) | Comments |
| UI | 3 | Confusing for getting started |
| Ease Of Use | 3 | Not the best that is available out there |
| Email Hosting | 5 | you are limited to send only 400 emails per hour |
| Databases | 5 | You can create unlimited databases, and it is limited to 5GB per database. |
| Applications | 5 | There are alot of variety of choices that you can choose from for you website. |
| Bandwidth | 5 | It is unmetered. Awesome |
| No of websites | 5 | Unlimited websites. |
| Backups | 5 | Awesome backup supports |
| Refunds | 4.6 | They are quick at processing your refunds and it is transferred in instance but the duration for refund is 30 days. There are hosting providers provide 120 days even. |
| Caching | 4.8 | They are providing their own custom caching plugin but it is not upto the level of openlitespeed |
| Speed | 4.9 | It is really so faster in most cases except it sometimes it takes a little longer for responding. |
| CDN | 4.6 | They do not have their own CDN but they have pre installed Cloudflare. |
| Uptime | 4.7 | They do have an Okayish uptime guarentee of 99.9% but still they could provide more. |
| Customer Support | 4.6 | The time taken alone is a little longer but they supporting people are awesome |
| Overall | 4.4 | The UI is harder to use and the resources in terms of storage is too low. |
Dreamhost - My Favorite
Why I mentioned I love dreamhost is because of two things one they have unlimited inodes limit and they have unlimited storage.
Which means you can post unlimited no of posts, in this hosting provider and I love it.
As you could see this is the best shared hosting provider that I could ever find and I will always recommend this hosting for anyone.
Yea they are also officially recommended by Wordpress itself. So even if you guys don't trust which is very sad to hear though but you can trust the wordpress organization itself.
If you are going to buy this hosting the one that I will recommend you to buy is that Shared Unlimited - 3 Years plan. That's how you will get the most value.
And You can just ask for a refund whenever you want within 120 days of the plan and this is the longest refund policy
| Criteria | Rating (Out of 5) | Comments |
| UI | 5 | Awesome UI just like hostinger, almost the same as the UI for hostinger. |
| Ease Of Use | 5 | It is easier to use and everything is organized properly |
| Email Hosting | 5 | you are limited to send only 100 emails per hour |
| Databases | 5 | You can create unlimited databases, and there is no such max limits which is awesome |
| Applications | 5 | There are alot of variety of choices that you can choose from for you website. |
| Bandwidth | 5 | It is unmetered. Awesome |
| No of websites | 5 | Unlimited websites. |
| Backups | 5 | Awesome backup supports |
| Refunds | 5 | They provide 120 days of money back guarantee. They are quick at processing your refunds and it is transferred in instance |
| Caching | 5 | They do also have openlitespeed cache I think so. |
| Speed | 4.9 | It is really so faster in most cases except it sometimes it takes a little longer for responding. |
| CDN | 4.6 | They do not have their own CDN but they have pre installed Cloudflare. |
| Uptime | 5 | They have 100% uptime guarentee, which is the awesome thing ever and if they failed to do so, they will extend the hosting period by the no of hours your server was down in days. |
| Customer Support | 5 | Awesome customer support |
| Overall | 5 | Overall I think this is the best shared hosting provider out there. Just get the 3 years plan for highest gain. |
I am giving them 5 stars for this shared hosting provider, it is awesome and cheap and unlimited just as they say, there is a little limitation on the basis of CPU but other than that you have everything.
Conclusion
At some point we will have to choose a shared hosting because of its ease of use and more things they provide,
Like you can have a lot of amateur level websites with wordpress in a shared hosting and it is easier to do the backups than the vps hosting.
If you are ever planning to get the shared web hosting, I will always at any point will guarantee you to get the DreamHost
It is the best deal that you could get but make sure you buy the 3 years package or you will not get the best deal.
If you are going to buy the DreamHost shared hosting, then use my affiliate link by which I can earn a little that will support me to do more content like these,
Click here, you will also get 2% discount on your purchase. FYI I only recommend the Shared Unlimited, Don't buy any other or you might not get the best.