There is something today that I must consider and be careful everytime I choose a hosting provider which is : Ressources. When you check offers of hosting providers you always see how much hard disk space they offer, bandwidth, database, ftp accounts … etc. But there is something that they never talk about which is how much ressources you have on this account !
Why ressources is important ? And what’s this story of memory is all about ?
Serving HTTP Error 505
This is something you won’t notice the first time you start your website, but after months of usage you may notice that your website is start serving lot of HTTP error 505. And this was a great tips that the hosting providers are using to hide what they are doing in the background.
The story is that every account, especially for shared hosting, have limited memory on the server. And every hosting provider use a different technique and strategy to limit this memory. Some of them limit it by account, for example you can’t use more than 32Mo RAM, everytime your scripts exceed this amount the process is killed and a http error 505 is served in spite of the page content. Others make this limitation on the process itself, if the process exceed the 10Mo RAM its automaticly killed … etc.
When can I be concerned
Dynamic websites which started to receive high traffic could be usually concerned by this problem, for example you choose a hosting of 5Gigs and 75GB of bandwidth and you think that its suffiscent, but in reality you are not able to exceed the 10GB of babdwidth thanks to this limit.
Many popular scripts I know are also concerned by this problem, for the simple reason that every request consume an average of 10Mo of memory, so if you multiply by 80 visitors online requesting in the same time this is 800Mo … !
Solutions
There is many solutions available depending on the business you are running or looking to start. If its a dynamic website and going to have a huge traffic you can start with a small account, but you should have in mind that its better to migrate to a standalone server and not a virtual server !
Try choosing systems to run your website that have caching systems to limit the consumption of memory, or better that generate static pages of your website. Static pages don’t require any process by the server and so you limit the consumption of memory in all your server and in the same time increase the number of visitors that you can serve in the same time.
Conclusion
So be aware before using free scripts and thinking that every hosting can support it without problems, this could be okay in the beginning but days after days you’ll notice that the service is becomming very slow. Which could have very negative effect on your website. Keeping your website in a good host is necessary to offer better service.
