StableHost – Blog

One of the toughest jobs we have is making sure the customer understands the limits of shared hosting.

What exactly is shared hosting? Most customers have never heard that word before, they just know they buy web hosting from StableHost.com. Shared hosting is the term companies use where they purchase a server which is shared amongst all of their customers. A shared server can have anywhere from 100 to 2000 clients on it, depending on specs, load, etc. We have many shared servers that we spread our customer base out equally to each of them.

On average, web hosting companies will allow each customer to use a certain amount of CPU, normally this ranges from 10-15%. CPU is the most valuable resource when it comes to a server and therefore there is always a limit of how much each website can use. When web hosting companies state a 10% CPU limit, that means you can burst up to 10% (usually for up to a few minutes) but that doesn’t mean you can constantly use 10%.

We’ll explain why — let’s take the average server cost, $500/month for the server, rack space and bandwidth. If we allowed a customer to constantly use 10% of the server, that means we could only have 10 clients per server. That means each customer would have to pay $50/month and that gives us no overhead, no support costs, no paying employees, no upgrades, nothing. With the average web hosting cost of $5/month, that averages out to the customer paying for roughly 1% of the CPU.

99.9% of websites will fall under the 10% CPU, however the 0.1% of usually our highest submitting ticket customers. We run cloudlinux which basically limits each customer to 10% automatically. Before cloudlinux came around, we would have to watch for it constantly and suspend if we saw someone abusing resources. They make it easy on us now where the server does all the hard work and will limit a website if they are using more then 10%. When your website gets limited, it will either be extremely slow or you will not be able to reach it.

These types of websites are suitable for shared hosting:

- A personal blog or website
- A forum for a few friends or a small community
- A gallery of pictures
- Your small business website

These types of websites are NOT suitable for shared hosting:

- A large forum (over 30 people online at a time)
- A large blog (Over 10,000 visitors a day)
- Any type of web-based game

So what happens when you outgrow shared hosting? The next step is VPS which is your own virtual server. It’s where a web hosting provider will split a dedicated server into smaller pieces and allocate 1 piece to each customer giving them dedicated CPU/Memory resources. VPS’s with cPanel start roughly around $50/month and go up from there. Once you outgrow a VPS, the next step is a dedicated server which start usually around $150-$200/month.