Is your shared hosting still enough?
With most new businesses, having a domain and a website is the first thing they usually do. Aside from establishing their online brand and identity, emails coming from a company’s domain name gives more credibility and look more professional. Most would start with a shared hosting account because it is easy to activate, manage and use and on top of that, it’s also the cheapest. You can host your domain name, send an average number of emails daily and host a basic website on shared hosting plans. However, there would come a time that you will outgrow your shared hosting as your business, your digital requirements and your online presence becomes more mature.
So, let’s talk about what exactly is a shared hosting account, when do you need to upgrade as well as your options with 1PesoHosting.Com once shared hosting is not enough.
Shared Hosting
In a shared hosting environment, server resources are shared approximately to about a hundred or so domains or accounts. Each account is allocated a finite number of resources such as disk space, bandwidth and even if you are subscribed to an unlimited space and bandwidth plan, you still have a limited number of inodes (inodes are explained in this article). However, CPU and memory are much more difficult to allocate so all shared accounts are expected to be within a certain CPU and memory consumption. While we ensure that our servers have enough memory and CPU cores (our servers start with 16 cores and 16GB of RAM), it means all the accounts residing in one server will need to share these limited resources. Normally, this is fine for small websites with minimal utilization such as brochure type websites and about 20-50 emails a day. But, once an account starts to consume more memory and CPU, the rest of the accounts on that same server will definitely be affected.
That is why at 1PesoHosting.Com, we have regular monitoring and have processes to ensure that accounts going above a certain usage are either notified or suspended. We also have tools that automatically kills processes when a sudden spike in CPU or memory usage is detected.
When to upgrade
As your business grows, your website needs might grow too. You might be sending and receiving more emails, bigger attachments or adding more email boxes for new employees. When you started, you probably had a brochure website but things are getting better so you started selling online, or installed web app such as enrollment systems for schools, accounting or inventory systems or human resources systems might have been added to your shared hosting account. You might have added more CMS (content management systems) such as WordPress or multiple WordPress for different domains you host in your account. All these things including more website visits, add to the CPU and memory consumption of your site which could lead to breaching the limits we have set.
Once this happens you might notice your website starts slowing down because our tools are limiting your resource usage or from time to time you encounter downtimes or errors because the CPU process is being killed. Worst is that our system admins might notice too much over usage that they will be forced to suspend your account to protect other shared hosting accounts on the same server where your website resides. This would be the time you need to start considering options such as getting multiple accounts (when you have 2 or more domains in one hosting), a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server.
Virtual Private Server
A VPS acts like a physical server where you are allocated your own disk space, bandwidth and higher inodes too but compared to a shared hosting account, you get to have a dedicated CPU and memory. This means that even if you max out the CPU and memory allocation, no one else is affected as the whole virtual server is yours. Of course, your site can get more resources as the whole CPU and memory is yours unlike with a shared server where you can just use a fraction of it.
On top of this benefit, you also get additional features such as the ability to host multiple websites, full control of the server (root
account) and the ability to customize the server or install applications requiring terminal (command line) access. While we have VPS plans that can go as much as 16 CPU cores, 640GB of disk space and 64GB of memory, compared to a dedicated server, a VPS is still slower since the whole server is still not fully committed to you.
Dedicated Server
The highest offering with 1PesoHosting.Com is a dedicated server. As the name implies, the whole server is dedicated to you. You get full access to the server and all its resources are allocated to your
site(s) alone. While it is the most expensive, it does offer the biggest allocation specially if you need a huge disk storage. Our servers can go as much as 48 CPU cores, 128GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.
So, at the end of the day, regardless of which plan you chose, you need to look at how well your site is performing and if you noticed something different compared to when you started, and you have added more features to the website that has been on the same plan for more than 3 years, then perhaps you need to consider upgrading.
If you’re curious to know how much CPU and memory your site is consuming at the moment, send us a message and we’ll be glad to send over some data.
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