Shared hosting, no matter how their packages are painted, have limits. Staying away from hogging too much CPU, memory, and other resources can ensure the longevity and performance of your shared hosting account. If you are just looking into how to build a site, or if you already have a very busy site on shared hosting, these guidelines can help you get the most out of your shared hosting account before making the switch to more expensive hosting. One of the goals in this post is to encourage "good neighbor" practices that will ensure you aren't disrupting fellow users on the server that hosts your account. This also ensures that you won't get any of these principles also apply to other types of hosting, but this is written with shared hosting in mind.

Common bottlenecks

With modern shared hosting, you generally have plenty of available disk space and ...

So, I want to move away from mod_php for the obvious security reasons.

FastCGI is a good alternative. I want to make the transition as easy as possible for my users. The transition on my Bluehost account from the regular PHP handler to the fastcgi handler is quite easy. All I do is add AddHandler fcgid-script .php to my .htaccess. Here are the requirements that I am looking for in transitioning to fastcgi for php:

1) Easy Transition - little or no user intervention required. I'd prefer that no intervention is required. 2) fastcgi scripts should be run using suexec for security and potential tracking purposes. 3) No scripts should be run when adding/removing users from the system. I want this to "just work" with the mod_userdir setup that we have.

Ideally, this change could be made during scheduled maintenance, and everyone could be automatically using the new fastcgi ...