Category Archives: Semi-Dedicated Server Hosting

My web host told me that I overloaded the server!

My Overloaded Server Story

From time to time I face problematic accounts that overload our servers. Usually these accounts are hosted on shared (note: cheapest) packages. I would like to highlight the issues and sort things out.

There are lots of reasons for a simple account starting to overload a server, one of the most common reasons being that the number of visitors to a website soars (traffic), or, the code powering the web site is not optimized, is out of date, has known security holes, or any combination of the above.

nuke From a traffic standpoint, a site that was used to having only 100 daily visitors could skyrocket to tens of thousands overnight because of some specific unpredictable event that came out of nowhere. This is generally a good problem to have, as most web site owners would like to have websites which have become extremely popular.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that bandwidth usage and load are somehow related. High bandwidth usage doesn’t mean that a website starts overloading the whole server. I’ve dealt with  accounts that have used hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth over the course of a couple days and at the same time, didn’t create any noticeable load. That is in part because our shared servers are extremely powerful and have super-fast uplinks, but also because the site was properly coded…

Continue reading

What kind of sites use unlimited hosting?

As promised in my last blog post, I said we would get into the types of web sites that generally make up the majority of which that are hosted on a server that offers unlimited web hosting packages.

Why is this important? Performance.

At GlowHost we are unique in the fact that we offer both traditional (disk space and bandwidth limited) shared hosting packages alongside our unlimited hosting packages. This is often a source of great confusion for many new web hosting customers, so lets look at how the type of server that you choose can directly impact the performance of your web site.
Continue reading