Hosting myths: 5 things we hear from new customers every week
Five hosting myths we hear every week from new customers: latency, the cloud, backups, security, and pricing models. What is real, what is marketing, and what matters for you.
After a few years of running hosting support, certain myths keep coming up. Here are five we hear every week, and what the actual story is.
Myth 1: “Cloud is always faster than bare metal”
False. Cloud adds a hypervisor layer + shared-NIC contention. For a single-tenant workload, bare metal is typically 5-15% faster on CPU-bound benchmarks and 30-50% faster on I/O-bound benchmarks. Cloud wins on elasticity (spin up 100 nodes for a batch job in minutes), but loses on steady-state performance. For a WordPress + MySQL workload, bare metal is the right answer.
Myth 2: “Latency is solved by a CDN”
Partly. A CDN solves the distance problem (US user -> US edge -> origin) but doesn’t help with the origin processing time. For most marketing sites, a CDN + a modest origin (1 vCPU + 1 GB RAM) gives 99% of the improvement you can get from caching. The other 1% comes from the application code itself (server-side rendering vs. static, image optimisation, HTTP/3 + 0-RTT).
Myth 3: “Backups are a thing the host does”
Mostly false. Every cloud host offers a “snapshot every 24 hours” feature, but a snapshot is not a backup. A backup is a copy you can restore from after a specific failure mode (ransomware, accidental deletion, hardware fault). The difference: snapshots are incremental, often within the same disk array; backups are off-host + versioned + encrypted + tested. We store daily backups in the same data center (Palitana) so you can restore from yesterday’s snapshot in under a minute.
Myth 4: “Security is the host’s problem”
Mostly false. The host owns the platform (kernel patches, network ACLs, hypervisor hardening). The customer owns the application (CMS updates, dependency upgrades, secret management, user access). A typical breach is an unpatched WordPress plugin, not a host-side vulnerability. Our managed-support add-on covers the host side; the customer is responsible for the app side unless they also opt into the application-management add-on.
Myth 5: “Bandwidth is expensive”
Mostly false. Bandwidth on the Palitana data center is Rs 1 / GB. The S3 storage plan is Rs 1.50/GB-month + free egress. AWS charges Rs 8-10 / GB egress. The difference matters for media-heavy workloads (image, video, large downloads) and not at all for typical text + API workloads.