Sharing a Web Server

When you are looking for a web hosting company, you may find that you’ll get a large discount if you share your server with other web sites.  You may have your own server and have many web sites on that.  The problem here is just like sharing your home with other people, there are things that are good and things that are not so good.

One problem that is common on a shared server is re-booting.  There may be a problem with another web site that causes this quite often.  This can be rather annoying because it amounts to down time for you and your web site.  You must, if you share a server, be ready to have more outages than if you were on your own dedicated server.

The other common problem is load.  When you have other web sites that you share with, there will not be as much bandwidth available to carry the load that your site demands.  Thus, your site may run slower and have more hic ups than if you were on a dedicated server.

Users that surf usually take a moment to scan the site to get information and they are off clicking to somewhere else.  When you get large sums of people doing this at the same time, this can cause a load on the CPU and this can cause problems with your site.

All servers have a limit to their capacity.  Even large servers can handle only so many requests at the same time.  When you’re CPU in the server hits capacity, then you can expect that it will take a few more moments for your visitor to be able to switch pages, this wait time can be quite annoying to people who are visiting your site.

Just as the CPU goes the memory.  No matter the size of the server, there is just so much memory.  When this memory gets maxed out, then some part of the process has to be sacrificed and this can slow down the whole show.  The more requests that are placed on the server at one time the more of the basic function has to sacrifice for the server to keep working.  This is when you can have delays that are very noticeable.

The only way to know if this is going to happen if you share a server is to test it.  You should be able to get a report of how much of the server your site requires, then take a look at what the others requirements are.  This should give you a pretty objective look at how things will go in your newly shared apartment.

A good web hosting company will be able to supply you with all this information in the form of a report so you can make a logical decision as to whether this will work for you or not.  Don’t forget to request this information first, and then interpret it, if you can’t, I am sure that they will have someone who can read it and help you avoid any future headaches you may be in for.