What Factors Affect Your Web Hosting

30 Nov What Factors Affect Your Web Hosting

Price is always a factor in choosing web hosts. However, higher prices do not mean that you’ll get a good web host. Higher prices do, however, mean that you have a better chance of getting good support, since at least they will have the money to hire more staff if they want to.

If you prefer (cheap) web host, you may suffer Bad support, repeated periods of “down” times (sometimes running even for hours with them not only unaware of the situation but also unreachable), email problems (their email system was down so mail from my visitors could not reach me), FTP problems, and so on.

If you’re running a business, we suggest you weigh the costs of your site being down against the cost of paying a few dollars extra per month for a good web host. Saving one or two dollars per month is not worth the loss of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars when your site goes down. When your site is “down”, you will lose your sales and customers for that period. If you’re earning from your website, it may be worth your while to pay those extra dollars. After all, as long as your site is “up”, you stand the chance of getting additional sales which will more than make up for the extra cost of a few bucks. Remember: no site, no sale.

Problems with Unlimited Space Plans:-

When web hosts provide “unlimited” space, they often have to restrict what you can use the disk space for. They need to do this since if every user really uses their “unlimited” space, the host would have to spend an unlimited amount of money to buy an unlimited number of hard disks to provide space for them.

As such, if you look at the Terms of Service (TOS) agreements of web hosts providing either unlimited space or incredibly huge amounts of disk space, you will notice that you cannot use the space for any purpose you choose. In most cases, their condition is that the space can be used only for the website. You cannot, for example, use the space as a sort of offsite backup space for your home or office computer.

Unlimited Bandwidth Plans:-

When it comes to bandwidth or data transfer, “unlimited” limitations are usually implemented by monitoring resource usage, a matter. Think if a web host provides unlimited bandwidth, many people will be attracted to their plans. Some of these people will be running huge static websites that will use enormous amounts of bandwidth. Since your site will also share the same bandwidth pipe as these people, and perhaps worse, be on the same server as they are, the performance of your site will be affected.

However, with more and more websites moving away from static pages to dynamically generated pages, the biggest limit that you will face is not your bandwidth or disk space, but what many web hosts vaguely classify as resource usage. For those not familiar with the terminology, static pages are simple HTML web pages. Dynamically generated pages are what you get when you use blogging scripts like WordPress or content management systems like Drupal. The scripts assemble your web page from a variety of sources, such as your database and your templates, every time someone visits it.

The Resource Limits your Web Hosting:

Three items generally use under the general heading of “resources” where web hosts are concerned. Two of these apply to all websites, and the third only to script-driven websites.

1. CPU Usage: Whether a web page is static or dynamically constructed, the web server’s CPU is used to obtain and deliver the web page to your visitors. When a page is dynamically created by a script, even more CPU cycles or resources are used, since the script has do a fair amount of processing to reconstruct your web page. It has to load the web template, obtain the data for that specific page from the database, execute the plugins or modules that you have installed, and finally assemble the page for delivery to the visitor.Since CPU time is a finite resource shared by all websites hosted on a particular web server, if any one website excessively uses the CPU, the other sites on that computer will not have an opportunity to deliver their pages in a timely fashion, and will appear either to be sluggish or non-responsive. As such, web hosts usually monitor the amount of CPU use by your site on shared web hosting plans, to prevent problems when a single website uses too much of the CPU time, adversely affecting the other websites on that server.
2. RAM Usage: However, probably no shared web host tells you how much of the system RAM your site is allowed to use, since it is difficult to specify such things. Nonetheless, RAM usage is another limit that your site faces.RAM is the temporary memory that holds your site’s scripts and their data while they execute. Unlike hard disk space, which web hosts can keep expanding by adding more hard disks, the maximum amount of RAM a machine can have is fixed. That measly amount of RAM is shared by all websites on that computer.This memory is needed by all programs that are run on the web server, including the server itself. If your scripts are huge, or they require a lot of RAM to execute, they will be competing in that limited pool of memory shared by all sites and all programs. As such, memory usage is another aspect of web hosting that web hosts monitor.
3. Database Connections or MySQL Connections: The data for dynamic websites is usually kept in special databases on the web host. A database server, such as the popular MySQL server, manages the database and provides the information requested by the site’s scripts when they need it.Database servers have a limit on the number of connections they can accept at any one time. When too many requests for data are made simultaneously, they run out of resources and are unable to service those requests. This typically happens when your site receives a large amount of traffic, or when you use a script that is not very efficient (for example, it makes too many requests for every page it delivers), or both.