As Hosting is a 24x7 business it is mainly a tough business. Everything like servers, bandwidth etc requires to be up and running 24x7. Redundancy in everything is the only solution in such a condition. One requires duplicating everything like having multiple power sources main power, UPS, generator, having multiple bandwidth providers etc. apart from this entire 100% uptime guarantee cannot be given. It is interesting to know that this kind of redundancy is wanted by web hosts from their providers. Nonetheless, hosting all their customers on a single server is the mistake made by many small hosts.
Having one high end server and filling them with as many accounts as possible is time and again considered better. Few reasons why a single server is preferred by webhosts -
1. Maintaining a single server is much easier.
2. Cost of buying multiple servers is more when compared to buying a single server.
3. Multiple O.S. Licenses and multiple control panel installations mean multiple servers. The cost of software is reduced.
4. More datacenter space is multiple servers while collocating.
5. A higher end server is considered better where customers look at the specs of a server.
6. Well-configured server when compared to poorly configured server can take more sites.
7. As the OS architecture is better a good OS such as NetBSD would take more sites.
When a single server can do the task no one would want to take multiple servers. Just selecting the right OS and configuring it by an expert is the only thing a webhost needs to do so that he/she can live a peaceful life hosting as many sites as he/she wants, perhaps even unlimited sites on a server. All this might sound too good to be true.
Most of the time even with over a 1000 sites thing looks very good. And thus it’s been decided by spammer to pay for a year and start spamming from the server. The sites start to take ages to load and the load is never below 20. All the sites will go down at one shot if the server crashes. Supposing server goes down in the morning hours of first day of the working week and the server has say about 1555 sites, then the webhost may end up with many cancellations and 755+ support tickets. Thus single servers may possibly mean:-
- As the number of support calls increases it means higher support costs.
- As the server is catering to more sites there can be higher server load. This would result in slower sites.
- As the number of users per server is higher there are more risks. More users per server is difficult to maintain.
Total throughput of the Ethernet card is another important aspect that many hosts forget when hosting on a single server. At any instant of time a single card would always have its limitations on amount of data it can push. If many of these sites are accessed at the same time, the Ethernet card would fail to push the data quickly when multiple sites are being hosted.
Lastly, lower-end servers consume less power than high-end servers. They are also heated up more than regular servers. This over heating leads to faster hardware failure.
On a typical server "How many sites can a webhost host?" No exact number is there for this. Just how many sites per server are ideal has to be determined by every host. Factors required to be considered to reach this figure: -
- The ratio of static to dynamic html sites on the server.
- Type of O.S. and software used.
- Different packages being offered by webhosts. Higher bandwidth, more mailing lists, databases etc. would mean higher server loads.
- Maintenance of servers. Servers that are not maintained on a regular basis have lesser sites hosted.
- Place where customers are located, as a lot of sites from the same time zone would have higher usage at the same time.
The load ought to generally be lesser than 1 for a single processor server. One can see the CPU load by using the w or top command on Linux. Or merely cat /proc/loadavg . 0.5 means that only half of the CPU time is utilized whereas the load average of 1 means the entire CPU cycle is being utilized by processes. Experiments determine the right load average.
A lot of importance should be given by webhosts to the amount of RAM as well as the type of network card used by the server. While taking server one should always go for high-end Ethernet cards. The maximum throughput of data would be ensured.
Web hosts cannot replicate the setting on servers because of the demand for different O.S. and control panels. Maintaining the servers will not be a problem if a good policy is in place. Webhost are allowed to broaden their offerings to the end users in terms of the O.S. and control panels offered by multiple servers.
Only when a server crashes or when a server is hacked the biggest benefit of having multiple servers is being understood. The number of trouble tickets is reduced in such cases, as every site that is hosted by the webhost is not affected. Instead of having an angry crowd of 1555+ customers at one shot it is better to have 250 customer sites down at a time in case of hardware failure. Multiple servers also mean that the webhost can spread the name servers across the servers.
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