Firedoglake – Firedoglake weblog » Note to Joe: You Get What You Paid For!
The first hosing company we went with was on a shared hosting account. This is the same thing that Joe has with MyHostCamp (a shared hosting account is exactly what it sounds like – numerous websites are hosted on a single server/computer). Numerous times throughout the day, we would go down. This was due to the number of hits coming in during a short amount of time. Every time a page is viewed, the server has to make thousands of calculations to process all that information and generate the page. This will have one of two possible end results; A). The processor overloads and the server shuts down or B) your account gets suspended for excessive processor usage. It is safe to say that Joe was hit by option B.We then moved from there to another hosting company, where we had a dedicated server. This meant that the only site coming off of that server was FDL. Of course with the number of visitors this site receives, we were also overloading and at times shutting down. Again – this was from excessive processor usage.
Finally we moved to where we are now and have two separate servers hosting this site and everything is running much smoother. We still hit very busy times where the site is slow to load, but we are staying up 99% of the time now.
I wonder how much of the shutdown was due to bandwidth overload vs. processor overload, since ISPs usually charge by the amount of bandwidth. Of course, if the backend of the site is getting hit hard (LAMP configuration) and can’t keep up with the load, then bandwidth overload is a moot point.