AI search and working with a developer
What is Shared hosting?
Shared hosting places many websites on one server, which is why it is cheap. For a small business site it is usually adequate; what varies enormously, and what nobody compares, is the edge configuration sitting in front of it.
Also called: cPanel hosting · web hosting
What to check beyond price and disk space
- HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 support — many shared hosts are still HTTP/1.1 only
- Brotli compression, or gzip only
- Whether the edge blocks crawler user-agents, which is invisible from a browser
- Time to first byte from where your customers actually are
- Whether you get real cPanel access and can take your own backups
The failure mode nobody checks for
Some shared hosts run an edge proxy that returns 403 to AI crawler user-agents before your server is reached. Your robots.txt is never consulted, nothing in the control panel mentions it, and the site works perfectly in a browser.
When to move
A static site on a free CDN platform gets HTTP/3, Brotli, a global edge and automatic TLS at no cost — and no crawler denylist. For a marketing site that is strictly better than most shared hosting, including paid.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.