As a hosting company, you have to monitor the development of technologies, programming languages and everything connected with it. Being a hosting provider involves a lot of commitment and presence in these areas because when your customers find themselves in trouble, they expect a solution from you. You must be up to date to be able to offer them a solution. And not only once, but continuously.
The top-notch hosting companies realize the responsibility that’s expected of them, so they must even implement some improvements preventively. By constantly improving their hosting services, both in software and hardware, they optimize servers to use their resources in the best possible way. In case you didn’t notice, the keywords we’ll focus on in this article are optimization and resources.
Resource Optimization
According to statistics, most of the top 1 million websites use cloud hosting type (47%), while only 7% use shared hosting solution. Some other types, such as dedicated hosting or cloud hosting are ranked in between. Also, according to statistics from the Internet, users of all hosting types want their websites to run 24/7 without any downtime and tend to give the hosting provider a negative rating if they aren’t provided with that.
In order for the hosting provider to provide uninterrupted running of websites to its users, the participation of users is also required. After all, it’s the user who places a software solution that should optimally utilize server resources on the leased hosting account.
How to Achieve This?
Some hosting companies offer unlimited hosting which also includes an unlimited number of email accounts and lists, FTP accounts, and subdomains. What does it actually mean and how much disk space and how much bandwidth do you get? Usually, there are no strictly defined restrictions for packages with unlimited disk space or data transfer. These resources are “unlimited”, which means that they aren’t charged according to the size of the disk space or the utilized bandwidth. Although they aren’t really infinite because nothing is infinite, clients are provided with all the resources they need to build an online business and 99% of users will have more than enough disk space and flow when purchasing these packages.
The use of server resources in the proper manner implies its workload only to the extent necessary to make a specific request – as fast and as easy as possible. Any unjustified use of server resources, multiplied by the number of visits, is an unnecessary waste of server power that, if not sanctioned by the server or hosting provider, will have to spill over somewhere.
There’s only one way to avoid this – to optimize your software so that it uses only the necessary resources by, for starters, using legal and proven solutions in a proven and reliable way. If like most users of shared hosting services, you use a commercial solution like WordPress, Joomla, etc. to launch your website or e-commerce, we recommend the following actions:
- Don’t install plugins and themes that haven’t been updated for a long time,
- Don’t install or use plugins or themes of unknown or suspected sources,
- Update plugins, themes, and the platform itself regularly,
- Delete plugins and themes that you no longer use.
In case you are using some other software or developing your own software solution, the way to become and stay optimized is to use the latest versions of the language in which you coded the software and leave it on the server.
How to Fix the “System Resource Exceeded” Message?
You may receive a message like “System Resource Exceeded” despite always running the same queries, storing an optimal amount of records in each database, and having databases automatically compacted and repaired when they close. This error message usually indicates that there’s a problem with your web server or hosting environment and then you should contact your host or administrator. There are numerous causes for such an error message, from the server memory out, exceeding the limitations of your server/plan, on to depletion of some other shared resource.
What can you do? You should reboot the webserver and if this message coincides with heavier than normal web traffic, web hosting (if on a shared server) limitations have been exceeded. That’s when it’s recommended to contact your host about acquiring your own dedicated server or to stay on a shared server but switch to MySQL database system supported by MySQL database hosting service. We recommend some of them as they are reliable and also offer great performance knowing they are based on MySQL open-source relational database management system. Basically, MySQL allows multiple users to create and manage numerous databases on a server. Knowing it’s widely used in many open source web applications such as WordPress, most web hosting providers already have MySQL installed on their servers so switching to this kind of a hosting plan doesn’t require much of an effort.
If It Still Happens to You…
Don’t despair, it can happen to everyone. When leasing a hosting company, you are advised to read and comply the Terms and Conditions of Use of the company whose services you are leasing because, generally, you’ll read there that it reserves the right to suspend any account for which it assesses that it uses an inexplicable or unnecessary amount of resources. It means that disk space and bandwidth weren’t used in accordance with the normal use and functioning of the website.
What is the criterion to determine the “normal use” of resources? Hosting companies regularly analyze statistics on the usage of bandwidth and disk space and use the results of those analyses to determine what’s “normal use”. Although this data varies from month to month, one thing remains the same: 99% of users fall into the “normal use” group. If the way you use bandwidth or disk space causes any problems, you will receive an email from a hosting company asking you to reduce your data transfer. Then, in most cases, you’ll have at least 48 hours to make changes before the hosting company takes action.
It rarely happens that the user exceeds the normal use of resources. Usually, problems occur if users use their accounts to store (e.g. large multimedia files) or share files. Hosting services aren’t intended to support such activities and, according to the Terms and Conditions of Use, bandwidth and disk space should be used in accordance with the normal functioning of the website.
If such information slips past the person that does monitoring, the server has automatic protection that’s activated in the specified case. Unfortunately, as a result of using more resources than necessary for the website to run properly, it’s the account suspension that comes next that can even lead in a permanent suspension. When this happens, users are often dissatisfied and shift the blame to the hosting company, which often ends up moving the website to another hosting company, where the problem continues. And so on…
Why Do Problems Occur at All?
As people say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The same goes for software. Prior to its launch, it’s necessary to have sufficient knowledge of what factors affect the optimal use of resources (as well as security aspects) and that knowledge should be applied to the software you plan to produce or use. Any neglect of these facts will generally have a bad effect on your internet story (company website, web service, etc.) and it’s in no one’s interest, right?
You might ask yourself – why hosting companies introduce unlimited web hosting if problems can occur? Unofficial statistics tell that only 1% of users can have a problem with an “unlimited” hosting package. As many as 99% of other users encounter the problem of how big the hosting package will meet their needs. For instance, there are situations when you need to migrate your website from shared to VPS hosting. For this reason, hosting companies make it easy for users to make a decision because if they are unsure how much space they need, it’s best to choose packages with unlimited space.
As a user, you shouldn’t confuse this with storage hosting, or dedicated hosting, but to know it’s the hosting that hosts websites. For instance, shared web hosting refers to a service where multiple sites, in a separate environment, are hosted on a single web server where it’s necessary to observe certain restrictions in order for all users to have a quality service provided.
Smartly, thoughtfully, up to date and – good luck!
