Why most Hosting Companies have Slow Servers
Browsing through a number of blogs and web-hosting forums the other day and I found numerous horror stories from users regarding their hosts. It’s not that these stories are uncommon or never heard of, but recently they have been getting more and more. Most will complain about the level of customer service that these hosts provide is unacceptable, while others rant on about the features promised are not the same upon sign-up. The more I read these stories, the clearer the pattern. All of them are related to just mostly a single issue – server stability.
So what’s the fuss about?
Most of us would want to be hosted inside power servers, where access times are fast, with lots of resources and there is not a single downtime. Yet, many complain about their hosts not delivering that standard. Why is that so?
Web hosting is a volume business. Hosting companies put between 500 to 1,000 websites on a single server, and it is not uncommon to see over 1,000 on these UNIX machines. Yet, this number is considered mild in terms of volume and is not considered overselling yet. A server hardly crashed even with all domains accessed at once.
The problems lies in the server-scripting each of these websites are running.
A single script running is not a problem. Ten is still good. Twenty and it slows down a bit; acceptable. On the other hand, try a thousand scripts running all at once (provided that each domain has only one script), and your server grinds to a halt. Adding insults to injury, you have programs written by many programmers with varying levels of skill. You may be an excellent programmer, but your well-written, streamlined code is competing against many poorly written, inefficient programs, and these poorly written programs eats up a lot of resources.
You have to understand that hosting companies are companies in their basic form too. Most just lack a brick and mortar place that you can visit. With that, they do have costs to cover, employees to pay, and profits to be earned. And in a highly competitive market for web hosting today, most web hosting companies almost always scrimp on back-end servers. They lease cheap servers which may have no quality assurance or performance monitoring. Since the hardware is usually remotely stored in a data centre somewhere, it’s very hard to fix problems at times, resulting in long downtimes.
What you should do to avoid such a mess?
No matter what server configuration your host promises you are on, and how it can improve your site’s performance, it can only go so far. You can’t push a diesel engine to run like an Indy race car, period.
The closes thing to a fast server comes is in form of a dedicated server or colocation, where there’s only an individual having all the resources to oneself. It’s a wise choice for big companies and busy websites generating thousands to millions of traffic daily. However, such options can be very costly for most of us. Start up businesses can’t possibly pay $300 - $800 monthly just to maintain a website that only generates a handful of traffic.
A viable solution for us to get a hosting account that does not break our bank account, yet still provides reliable and stable servers is for hosting companies to limit the number of domains and users in a single server or cluster. Such a practice is costly for smaller companies.
At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves this question. What’s the price of paying a little more each month to have your website running perfectly than having to deal with the constant headaches of downtime ever one day or so? Balancing needs and wants is hard, but if we are able to do that, we can get definitely get the ideal host.
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