Virtual Hosting Services – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
You can usually get a significant discount off website hosting fees by choosing a shared server. Or, you might have many sites of your own on the same system. But, just as sharing a condo can have benefits and drawbacks, so too with a web server.
The first factor is availability. Shared servers get re-booted more frequently than stand alone servers. That can occur due to many reasons. Another site's programs may cause an issue or make a change that requires a re-boot. While that's less frequent on Unix-based systems than on Windows, it still happens. Be prepared for more scheduled and unscheduled downtime when you share a server.
Load is the next, and more obvious, factor. One pickup truck can only carry so much weight. If the truck is already filled with someone else's boxes, it can not carry yours as effectively.
Most websites are relatively static. A reader hits a web page, then spends some time reading it before going to another. During that time, the server has the capacity to satisfy additional requests without impacting you. All the shared resources - CPU, memory, disks, bandwidth and other components - can easily support several users (up to a point).
But all servers have inherent capacity limits. The piece of hardware that executes software instructions (the CPU) can only handle so much. Most large servers will have several (some as many as 16), but there are still limits to what they can handle. The more requests they receive, the busier they are. At some point, your software request (such as accessing a website page) has to wait a bit.
RAM on a server functions in a similar way. It's a shared resource on the server and there is only so much of it. As it gets used up, the system lets one process use some, then another, in turn. But sharing that resource causes delays. The more requests there are, the longer the delays. You may encounter that as waiting for a web page to appear in your browser or a file to download.
Bottlenecks can appear in other places outside, but connected to, the server itself. Network components get shared with many users as does everything else. And, as with those others, the more requests there are (and the longer they tie them up) the longer the delays you encounter.
The most effective way to get an accurate look at whether a server and the connected network have enough capacity is to measure and test. All systems are able to report how much of what is being used.
Most can compile that information into some form of statistical report. Reviewing that data allows for a rational determination of how much capacity is being used and how much is still available. It also allows an experienced person to make projections of how much more sharing is possible with what level of impact.
With that report you can make a cost-benefit decision based on facts.
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