Shared Hosting: Security Concerns

 Web Hosting

Internet surfing has become part and parcel of our lives these days with numerous websites that provide us the convenience of either accessing information or entertainment online or serve commercial purposes. It is possible to access these websites over an active Internet connection because of the services and the technologies that are made available for this purpose by web hosting service providers. Prior to delving into shared hosting and the security concerns that are related to it, it is vital to gain knowledge about web hosting because shared hosting is one of the types of web hosting service.

Web hosting service providers, also known as web hosts, are companies that rent their web servers to website owners as well as provide all the necessary services and technologies which are meant to keep a website up and running seamlessly. This service is referred to as web hosting. The web server that is leased by web hosts serves the function of storing, processing and eventually delivering web contents. Web servers, that are crucial to the service of web hosting, manage client HTTP request related to web resources for one or more of the configured/served websites.

There are many web hosting options that one can choose from, based on one’s web hosting requirements. These can be shared, dedicated, Virtual Private Server (VPS), reseller, cloud, WordPress etc. Each of these types has its own pros and cons and is suitable for a particular set of requirements related to different websites. We often come across terms such as the “Best Windows Hosting Company”, the “Best Web Hosting Company” or the “Top Linux Hosting Company”. These refer to those web hosts that have earned the reputation of providing the best hosting service consistently.

Shared Hosting

As the term suggests, shared web hosting is a type of web hosting service in which a hosted website shares the same server space along with its resources, with one or multiple websites. In shared hosting, a single server hosts many websites. The number of websites that are hosted on a single server will depend on the hard drive space that is available, the RAM and on the processing speed. As is evident, the computing resources of the web server are shared by all the accounts that are on the shared server.

Shared hosting is able to accommodate multiple websites on a single server by storing each website’s files in a separate partition on the same server. Each of these websites has its own file directory tree. Users neither have access to the root nor to each other’s files.

Shared hosting is a very good entry-level service in the field of web hosting and offers an ideal hosting option for website owners with low budget or those with smaller and simpler websites, for bloggers and for small and medium-sized business owners as well as for startups. This type of hosting is a preferred choice for websites that receive very less traffic, those people with limited web hosting experience or those that don’t need to use extensive web programming and for those sites that want to be online in the shortest time span. Shared hosting owes its popularity to being the most cost-effective web hosting option that usually provides features which are easy to use, such as a user-friendly control panel meant for uploading one’s website’s files, adding databases and creating email accounts. 

Security Concerns

Shared hosting has many advantages, such as being less expensive as compared to the other types of hosting as well as being flexible and easy to self-manage. But it also presents some security concerns that need to be looked into. These security concerns arise majorly due to the fact that in shared hosting a single server hosts multiple sites. Firstly, it increases the vulnerability with regard to malware attacks. If anything malicious gets uploaded to any of the sites that are sharing space on the same server, then it puts the other sites at risk too. Another challenge that shared hosting presents is related to the fact that usually clients have access to Perl, PHP and shell accounts, which increases the probability of a DoS (Denial of Service) for all the other websites on the same server, when a program is written badly. Shared hosting can also lead to an external DoS for the entire hosting service. In this situation if any of the IPs becomes a victim to a DoS attack, then the others experience the same fate. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on the server enable hackers to control the entire server and then launch attacks on other servers.

Usually clients that use shared hosting service, end up sharing IP address with other clients. This causes a problem in the event that one of the websites using the same IP gets placed on a spam blacklist. In this situation, all the other websites that are in the same shared hosting environment and are using that IP would be blacklisted as well.

Conclusion

Shared hosting is a popular web hosting solution as it is cost-effective and easy to use. The security issues concerning this type of hosting can be averted to a large extent by taking certain precautions, such as installing a reliable firewall to block external threats and software that can protect against DDoS attacks on servers, limiting the use of executable commands, monitoring constantly against code uploads that are malicious in nature and suspending sites that are harmful as well as conducting careful screening of new clients’ identities. These are a few of the measures that can be employed to ensure that the security concerns related to shared hosting can be reduced significantly and its advantage can be availed to the max.

Source: https://htswebhosting.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/shared-hosting-security-concerns/