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If you too have been a systems engineer in your life since 2005, with thousands of servers and thousands of cases different from each other, you will agree with me that today we really can't take it anymore.
Otherwise you could believe in many urban legends that are served up by unscrupulous commercials and without any knowledge of the cause except that of mere profit.
Working in the IT sector has become demotivating and not very gratifying given that the market is now dominated by marketing and by real urban legends, disclosed by individuals without qualifications or experience in the systems field.
So let's start by listing what are questionable claims and denying the claim with logical reasoning and related documentation and references.
As we have new myths to add and disprove we will publish them updated in this post.
Shared hosts are slow.
It depends. First of all by the heaviness of the site to be hosted, by how many other sites are on the same machine, and by the resources that are grabbed by the other sites in virtual hosting on the same machine. It is undisputed to state that sharing a hosting with other sites does not give guarantees regarding performance and constancy of performance, given that another site hosted on our same server could monopolize resources and make ours also suffer.
If a hosting on our own server is hacked, attackers can attack our site.
Unlikely. Nowadays, except for a few unfortunate and improvised, all the Hosting have understood the importance of the separation of privileges at the level of processes and filesystems. If today they pierce the site hosted in virtual hosting on our own server, the attacker does not have the sufficient privilege to be able to write / read our files or our database.
The situation is different in which the attacker holes the site hosted near ours and then proceeds with unlikely exploits to the elevation of maximum privileges (root), at which point he can compromise all the sites on the same server.
Hosting with guaranteed resources is better than hosting in best effort.
It depends. If you have to choose to have guaranteed resources (minimum and maximum) of 1 core, 1GB of RAM, always prefer hosting in best effort. It is true that you will not have guarantees on the minimum resources reserved for you, but it is also peacefully true that for over 90% the best effort solution will produce better values and higher performance than a solution with dedicated but insufficient resources to run a site correctly.
With the Cloud you save because you only pay for what you consume.
Obviously false claim in at least 90% of real uses. It is true that the Cloud has a pay per use model rather than a Flat model (today both options actually exist), but the cost of the cloud is normally four times (minimum) compared to the same solution on a dedicated server.
To be clear, where on Amazon LightSails you buy 2vCPU and 4GB of RAM (to which you add the costs of outgoing traffic), you buy 1 Dedicated Server with 12 threads (equivalent to 12vCPU) and 64GB RAM with the same cost, with level performance obviously higher I / O and system bus.
With the Cloud I can scale vertically from 1 CPU to 128 CPU with just one click.
It depends. Normally with some top suppliers in the AWS market, Google Cloud, Azure, it is obviously possible to do this with rather prohibitive costs. Common sense should always reign supreme, if we buy the Cloud without a real need for vertical scaling (increase resources on a single instance) we are making an unnecessary expense for an event that will never happen.
Does it make sense to spend large amounts on basic performances, just because maybe in the future we would need to climb? The answer is subjective and lies in the common sense of analyzing particular events (traffic peaks, slashdotting effect, black friday) etc.
The Cloud is more reliable than a Shared Hosting or a Dedicated Server.
It depends. Which Cloud? Which company? What virtualization technologies? What type and model of SAN? What backup and disaster recovery procedures? Do geographic replicas on different regions make it? If they don't make them by default, do you do them as a system administrator? The Cloud could be infinitely less reliable than shared hosting or a dedicated server. It is true that cars have 4 wheels, but it is not true that 4 wheels determine a car.
SSH access must be denied because it exposes you to security risks.
It depends. SSH access with user and non-root privileges, granted in an environment where the policy on users and groups are correct, does not expose any security problems. However, for a malicious user in an outdated system, it could be a priority route to proceed with escalation of privileges and attempt to climb to root and therefore compromise the security of the entire server. Let's say that to remedy the incompetence of many systems engineers, we prefer not to grant what should be a right.
Hostings must always provide a control panel such as Plesk / cPanel or similar.
It depends. Do you really need it? Or just access your MySQL files and database? Because cPanel and Plesk are general purpose solutions that bring with them very important performance issues and sometimes even security. Therefore, on serious projects, where real traffic runs, millions of page views per month or millions of turnover, we always try to obtain the maximum yield, and the maximum yield is not obtainable with panels like Plesk or cPanel. If, on the other hand, you are looking for maximum independence, perhaps to install hundreds of showcase sites, a control panel like Plesk or cPAnel could be the solution to your independence problems.
If I have a site for Italy it is better to have an Italian IP in an Italian datacenter for SEO purposes
False. Definitely false. What era do you live in, at the dawn of 1996? This rule was valid until the year 2000, then it was largely supplanted. Most successful Italian sites today are located in datacenter facilities in Germany or France. Today we no longer think in terms of countries, but of continents. It is therefore correct for an Italian site to have a datacenter with a good ping and low latency in Europe. Whether it's in Italy, Holland, France, it doesn't matter.
CloudFlare and CDNs speed up the website.
False. At least in the collective idea of using CloudFlare and CDNs. If you have an Italian site, with a European audience (let's go back to the question above), CloudFlare will not improve anything, indeed it could even worsen the delivery of content. If, on the other hand, we are faced with an international site, also accessed at an intercontinental level, CloudFlare can certainly be a suitable solution in decreasing latency and accelerating the delivery of content.
However, we have said and written a lot about CloudFlare in this article.
