Why Doory No Longer Hosts WordPress Sites on Shared Servers

For over a decade, shared hosting and WordPress were the default starting point for small businesses getting online. It was cheap, it was familiar, and it mostly worked — until it didn't. After years of managing WordPress sites on traditional shared hosting infrastructure, we made a decision: Doory is no longer offering PHP/WordPress hosting on shared servers.

This wasn't a snap decision. It came after countless hours spent recovering hacked sites, cleaning malware, troubleshooting broken plugins, and trying to squeeze performance out of an aging model. Here's the honest breakdown of why we made this change and what it means for our customers.

The Shared Hosting Problem: Too Many Sites, Too Little Server

Shared hosting has a fundamental business model problem. To keep prices at that attractive $5-per-month mark, hosting providers have to pack as many accounts as possible onto a single server. Hundreds — sometimes thousands — of websites sharing the same CPU, memory, and disk resources.

The result? When one site gets a traffic spike, every other site on that server slows down. When one account gets compromised, the entire server is at risk. Your website's performance is at the mercy of every other site sitting next to it. You're essentially sharing a tiny apartment with a hundred strangers and hoping nobody throws a party at 2 AM.

This is old technology running on an old model, and the cracks have been showing for years. Security vulnerabilities are baked into the architecture. Cross-site contamination, outdated server software, and limited isolation between accounts make shared hosting environments a constant target for attackers.

The WordPress Lie: "Anyone Can Build a Website"

WordPress powers a massive chunk of the internet, and for good reason. It's flexible, extensible, and has an enormous ecosystem. But the marketing promise — anyone can build their own website — has done a lot of damage.

Here's the reality. Someone installs WordPress, picks a theme, uploads enormous unoptimized images straight from their phone, installs a dozen plugins they found on a blog post, and publishes. The site loads in eight seconds. Half the plugins haven't been updated in a year. The contact form plugin has a known vulnerability. And the admin password is "business123."

WordPress is powerful software. But it requires knowledge and ongoing maintenance to run well. Plugins need regular updates, and those updates sometimes break things. Themes need to be kept current. Images need to be optimized. The database needs occasional cleanup. Security hardening isn't optional. For most small business owners, this isn't what they signed up for when they were told they could "easily build a website."

Weak Passwords and the Security Spiral

We can't talk about WordPress security without talking about passwords. A shocking number of WordPress admin panels are protected by passwords that can be cracked in seconds. "Password1," "companyname2024," "admin123" — we've seen them all. Automated bots scan the internet constantly looking for WordPress login pages, and weak credentials are the easiest door to walk through.

Once a site is compromised, the damage cascades. Malware gets injected. Spam pages appear. Customer data may be exposed. Google flags the site as dangerous. And the business owner calls us, panicked, wondering why their website is showing pharmaceutical ads in a foreign language.

The Single Point of Failure

Traditional shared hosting with WordPress creates a fragile stack. Your database, your application code, your uploaded files, and your server configuration all live in one place. If the server goes down, everything goes down. If a WordPress update conflicts with a plugin, the whole site can white-screen. There's no redundancy, no graceful degradation, and no easy rollback for most small business hosting setups.

For a business that depends on its web presence to attract customers, this is an unacceptable risk.

The Real Cost of $5 Hosting

Here's what we learned after years of running shared WordPress hosting: the support cost far exceeded the hosting revenue. We were spending hours helping customers recover from hacks, remove malware, troubleshoot plugin conflicts, optimize slow-loading pages, and make content updates that they couldn't figure out on their own.

That level of hands-on support simply isn't sustainable at $5 a month. It's not fair to our team, and frankly, it wasn't producing good outcomes for our customers either. Their sites were still slow. They were still getting hacked. They were still calling us frustrated.

Modern Stacks Are the Answer

The web has moved forward, and so have we. Modern web technologies offer dramatically better security and performance than traditional WordPress on shared hosting. Static site generators, JAMstack architectures, edge-deployed applications, and managed platforms eliminate entire categories of vulnerabilities. There's no database to inject. There's no admin panel to brute-force. There's no plugin ecosystem slowly rotting from neglect.

Sites built on modern stacks load faster, scale better, cost less to maintain, and are inherently more secure. They don't need constant patching. They don't fall over when a single plugin author abandons their project.

Where We Are Now

Over the past year, we've been migrating our customers' sites off of WordPress and onto modern technologies. It's been a long process — every site is different, and we've taken care to ensure nothing is lost in the transition. But the results speak for themselves.

Support tickets have dropped significantly. Sites load faster. Security incidents have essentially disappeared. And most importantly, our customers are happier. Their websites look professional, perform well, and actually represent their businesses the way they deserve.

Your website is often the first impression a potential customer has of your company. It should be fast, secure, and reliable. It shouldn't be sitting on an overcrowded server, running outdated software, protected by a password your dog could guess.

We're proud of the direction Doory is heading, and we're excited to keep building better web experiences for our customers.