Ubercart

I am also building a site on a shared host. My client has the same concerns. He wants a secure transaction. Does being on a shared host automatically eliminate that possibility? The suggestion by the web host was to step up to a dedicated IP. I was surprised not to find this as a common discussion here.

Thanks in advance.

I think you should reconsider trying to run a site with UC from a shared host. You run a big risk of disappointing customers.

Shared sites sound great. Unlimited storage. Unlimited bandwidth. There are big gotchas waiting. First, their contracts always talk about their right to terminate your site if it consumes too many resources. There are lots of server resources they can measure to make this determination. They will, too, and quickly in order to encourage you to upgrade to more expensive options. Second, they will put you on a server with dozens, maybe hundreds of sites. All competing on something like a duo core, maybe duo core quad processor with something like 4GB, maybe 8GB of RAM, and all banging at the same harddrives.

Now, consider that Drupal uses databases for everything. Even siomple pages can require -- literally -- dozens of SQL queries to populate everything. UC adds more database activity. Database activity is very processor-intensive.

What I have seen happen, many times, is someone creates a new site on something like a shared account, goes out and announces it, traffic surges because of the initial interest, and then the site goes down or serves pages so slow and has so many hangs that users stop trying.

If you expect to make any money at all, you need to consider a dedicated server. You can rent basic servers for under $100. Even a VPS (virtual private server) will leave you severely strapped for RAM.

The shared sites are fine when you serve mostly static HTML pages. Even dozens of users could be served concurrently from a shared server in that context. That's not Drupal, however. Even static "Page" content is stored in a MySQL database. Just go look at how many tables there are for your Drupal site in MySQL. Dozens and dozens. Just look at how many for UC. Several. If you get more than a few concurrent users with a shared server, you'll find that pages load slowly, etc.

Drupal is not well-suited for shared servers. It is designed for efficient production and editing of content. It is not the most efficient solution for serving content. You need more server "ummph" than you would with static HTML pages.

I have a site on a development machine. It will offer video streams, image galleries, forums, etc. The only cost-effective solution I can find is a colocated server. That means, I buy the server and take it to the host. I expect I will eventually need multiple servers. One for video, one for the forums, and one for everything else. I'll start with one server. But I am confident that a shard server or VOPS cannot handle the load. I'll just end up disappointing people when the site crashes or hangs.

Cheers,

Mitch

It is my understanding that if the web server is not running as the account owner but instead as 'nobody' (or some equivalent) then one account user can write a php program to read your settings.php file and then they'll have full access to your database! A VPS (with lots of ram) or a dedicated machine offers better security.