Why two businesses should not share one hosting account Print

JSWeb partners with Spiral Hosting (https://spiralhosting.com/). 

We recommend every company/business has their own hosting plan for website security, data protection and performance/speed reasons.

It can sometimes be tempting to host multiple business' websites on a single hosting plan for convenience/cost reasons, in particular if you are solely responsible for managing those websites. However, multiple businesses sharing a single hosting account is a bad idea, it often causes problems, and we will explain some of the reasons here.

Website security
If the website software on one business were to be exploited/compromised, it could cause serious issues for both businesses. As an example, nearly 40% of all websites are now running WordPress software. Our abuse department deal with WordPress exploits/compromises every day of the week. Many of these exploit scripts hide malware files in sub-directories across a hosting account so they can run an exploit weeks/months down the line. Malware/exploits from one website can quickly impact another website on the same hosting plan. We regularly see business websites defaced or involved in spamming/phishing, sometimes causing other providers to blacklist websites and email. Restoring backups and fixing these issues can cause a lot of downtime for any business.

Data protection/privacy
If two businesses are sharing a hosting account, they can't follow data protection/privacy regulations and will not be GDPR compliant. Any privacy policy statement or DPA (data processing agreement) created by the business would have to explain that another company/business has access to the client's personal data. In your business' role as a "data processor", you have clear legal obligations (especially for EU and UK companies), including declaring any third parties who are involved in the collection and storage of data. Even if you are a director/manager of both businesses, we do not think you can meet those obligations unless each business has separate hosting services.

Performance/speed
Every hosting account has its own technical resources: CPU processing power, RAM memory, data IO (input/output) and EPs (entry processes). All of their resources have their own limits. If one website starts using more resources because of a surge in traffic or some technical/software fault, other websites on the same hosting plan will be impacted too. Website visitors might see a warning message, slow loading speed because resources are being throttled, or potentially 503/508 "resource usage exceeded" errors that stop the website loading altogether.