Seriously. If your business depends solely on your website, and you are expecting lots of visitors when sales are on — don’t host it on a shared host. Especially ones that are obviously overselling.

Zazz is an Australian shopping site in the style of Woot, where it sells one and only one item each day, at very cheap price starting at 12:00am AEST time. I should blame these guys for keeping me from going to bed early, but it’s probably my own fault.

So I tried to open up that site at around 10 minutes past mid-night, and what’s presented in front of me was not the familiar website, but the dreadful cPanel account suspended message.

Aargh! But I think the guys that are running Zazz must have gone “AAARRGHHH!!!!” Fortunately the site is restored 20 minutes later, but I am sure it puts stress on everyone.

As this business grows in popularity, it also starts to have more issues with its host, BlueHost in Utah. A few weeks ago they ran a special one day sale going through multiple different items at 30 minute interval, and that really killed their server. And I will not be surprised if the fiasco tonight gets repeated in the future.

That’s why it is simply unwise to host your ecommerce site, the very website that generates all the revenue to your business, on a cheap shared hosting that can suspend your account without much prior warning. BANG! And there is no more business.

A dedicated server, a VPS with guaranteed CPU cycles, or even clustered shared hosting that can handle traffic spike, are much better choices.