Shared Hosting Limitations – in India
We all love Shared Hosting Services, Why? Because they are cheap.
In fact, 80% of website online are hosted under some shared hosting servers.
As a Hosting Company, We understand that not all customers are technically strong to understand the technicality of shared hosting architecture.
Architecture Of Shared Hosting
Basically, there are two types of shared hosting services: Linux Shared Hosting and Windows Shared Hosting. As the name suggect the major difference is a major difference if the Base OS.
Base OS : Is the operating system on which your shared hosting server is built upon.
We will not discuss the feature of each shared hosting type as they are mentioned in details under our Linux Shared Hosting and Windows Shared Hosting Page.
As of now, You should understand that when you opt for shared hosting services are basically agreeing to share your server resources.
Shared hosting is a way for hosting providers to create segments on a dedicated server. A single instance of an operating system, web server, application server, and file storage is partitioned so that a dedicated server can support 2 or even 20 customers.
Each customer is sharing the same physical server as shown in the diagram.
The Base server handling all the loads and services for all the customers.
The server provides Database, Email Hosting, application services like the apache server.
Limitation Of Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is designed to keep a hard limit on resources, to keep thing fair with other hosted customers.
However, there are other limitations that are normally ignored by end-users.
Single Point Of Failure
As you can clearly see from the above diagram, there are several single layers of services.
Each layer provides critical service to a website hosted on the server.
At any given point if any layer gets affected due to any reason the server can come down and your website will go offline.
If there is a failure of a physical device, such as a motherboard, CPU, or disk, all of the customers on the shared hosting server are impacted.
Most providers create application clusters and database clusters to reduce the impact of outages.
But this still takes time and performance is still severely impacted.
Recovery from outages can be as quick as 20 minutes or as long as a few hours.
Solution?
Have a backup solution, Netspace (India) provide a backup solution as addon service which can be brought separately with every plan.
This will make sure that a backup is created in a remote location and in case of any issue data can be retrieved.
Performance Limitation
The cost of shared hosting can be very cheap (Also Read: Shared Hosting Vs VPS Hosting)
But everything comes with a cost, Prices generally increase with performance and options The main problem with shared hosting is that applications and databases are only good at partitioning disk space.
Shared hosting is completely ineffective at allocating and partitioning CPU, memory, and network bandwidth.
Shared hosting customers usually see performance issues caused by heavier users on a shared hosting server.
This cannot be easily resolved without sophisticated monitoring tools that throttle applications and databases for one customer in the case of heavy load, in order to maintain performance for all of the other customers.
Shared hosting also does not provide a lot of options or custom configurations. Providers needed to create pre-defined segments that can quickly be provisioned.
Solution?
At Netspace (India), we use CloudLinux for our Linux Shared Hosting services which put a Limit on hosting resources.
The video below explains the working of cloud Linux.
Cloud Linux will make sure no misuse of resources will happen in shared hosting.
Files (Inodes) Limit (No Unlimited Hosting)
This is the limit every hosting provider will keep under the hood of unlimited hosting.
This simply means how many files you can keep under your shared hosting plan.
For example in our Linux Shared Hosting plan, we have an Inodes limit of 250,000 Inodes, This is the limit of the number of files that is allowed under the hoods of the shared hosting company.
That is the reason, We call out the highest plan as an unmetered plan, not an Unlimited Plan.
Concurrent Connections Limitation
No, Concurrent Connection does not mean, Number of website visitor.
A concurrent connection is how many people are calling a task at any given moment.
If they click to read a thread in your forum, then a post in that thread, that is 2 connections, but they are one at a time.
If you have 10 people who click to read a post at the same time, (not the same post, just a post in the forum) that is 10 concurrent connections.
As each one finishes, and the page is loaded, that connection is closed.
A real busy website like this one, would likely, easily go over 50 to 100 connections per second.
They are concurrent if they are all working on loading the page at the same time. They are dropped from the count, as each finishes loading the page.
Physical Memory/RAM and CPU Limitation
You may have heard the terms “CPU” and “memory” (or “RAM”) when purchasing a new computer.
These are components that help run your computer, and since servers are basically powerful computers they exist in servers (your web hosting) as well.
These components help power your website and keep it running when you are a shared hosting service you can not use the entire CPU and RAM of your hosted server, As a result hosting company put a limit on CPU and RAM limit (We have 2 GB limit).
Incoming and Outgoing Limit (Email Limits)
Normally Shared hosting provider keeps limit on outgoing and incoming mail to avoid spamming and overloading of server.
We have a limit of 250 emails per hour in shared hosting server and there is no limit in incoming mails.
In fact, We don’t even recommend having a shared hosting email service to be used if you really want your email to have high uptime. I recommend reading Type Of Email Service before considering email service under shared hosting.
If you are serious about your email delivery, I recommend a specialised email hosting solution provided by Netspace (India. )
I/O (KB/s) Limit
IO limits restrict the data throughput for the customer. They are in KB/s. When the limit is reached, the processes are throttled (put to sleep). This makes sure that processes within the server cannot go over the limit, Yet don’t stop working, nor getting killed — they just work slower when the limit is reached.
In our case, the I/O limit is 2,048 The IO limits will only affect DISK IO, and will have no effect on the network.
It also doesn’t take into consideration any disk cache accesses.
So, even if a file is loaded from disk cache 1000 times — it will not be counted towards IO limits.
Recommend Read: What is DISK I/O and DISK IOPS how does it affects the performance of server?
MySQL / MSSQL Concurrent Connections Databases Limit
If you get a Too many connections error when you try to connect to the mysqld server, this means that all available connections are in use by other clients.
Most shared hosting accounts would allow you 10-25 simultaneous connections to the MySQL databases.
If you have still not read the ToS, do it now.
Conclusion
When you exceed any of the above limits, you receive an error called “508-resource Limit Is Reached”.
Whenever you see that error, It’s almost certain that you have outgrown a shared hosting environment. (Unless you are under an attack) Just confirm you had a high number of visitors before opting for a VPS or dedicated server.
Feel free to connect us, if you want us to design your own custom hosting architecture as per your website requirement.
Or leave a comment if you have any feedback or query.
Shashi kant Pandidhar
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