While looking for an appropriate web hosting solution for your website, you will come across different web hosting packages that offer various configurations of storage space, monthly bandwidth, memory and CPU. However, apart from the standard factors, there are other important factors that you need to consider while signing up for a web hosting package, they are mentioned below:
- What is web hosting I/O usage?
- What does IOPS mean?
- What Is Entry Processes Limit?
- What Is Number Of Processes?
The factors mentioned above are extremely crucial considerations and usually they are not mentioned by the web hosting companies to the end users. You can only know about these factors when you purchase the web hosting package. You will be able to see the I/O usage, IOPS, entry processes and number of processes in your web hosting control panel only if your web host allows these specifications to be displayed.
At times, you can ask about these technical specifications during a pre-sales chat or email query; however, there will be few sales people who know about them.
Some web hosting providers include these factors in technical information that is mentioned in a small print in the ‘Terms and Conditions’, ‘Fair Usage Policy’ or in the ‘Terms of Use’ section.
Let’s have a deeper look at these factors so that you can make a better decision about choosing the right web hosting solution.
What Is Web Hosting I/O Usage?
The web hosting I/O usage refers to the disk input and output (I/O). The disk I/O speed specifies how fast the website or scripts are allowed to carry out the input and output operations per second on your hosting server. Therefore, when it comes to the I/O range, the more the better. When someone visits your website or when you send or receive an email, your hosting server is carrying out the I/O operations.
If your server is set on a low I/O speed, your website and scripts will always perform at a slow pace; irrespective of the storage space, bandwidth, CPU and RAM offered in your web hosting package. A slow hosting platform will make your website slow resulting in damaging the online reputation, it may lead to data loss and bad email communication.
Offering a higher I/O is expensive for the web hosting providers which is why they do not allow more than 1 MB/s disk I/O speed on a shared server.
Benefits of having a higher I/O limit:
- More read/write data can be executed on the disk.
- Useful for hosting videos and downloading or streaming on the website.
- Enables large scripts to run faster.
- Helps in the execution of large database queries and operations.
- Prevents website freeze or slow loading of a website with heavy scripts.
What Does IOPS Mean?
Similar to the I/O speed, IOPS refers to Inputs Outputs Per Second. IOPS determines the speed at which a hard drive reads data from and writes data to a hard drive. IOPS is used for both traditional spinning hard drives and SSD drives. For instance a 7.2k SATA drive contains about 80 IOPS. When it comes to a hosting server, even though some web hosting providers provide SSD hosting, but in reality they limit the IOPS for every account to a certain value. The most important fact for you to know is that the higher the IOPS, the faster your website will be.
What Is Entry Processes Limit?
An ‘Entry Process’ denotes the number of PHP scripts running at a single time. An entry process usually takes approximately 1 second to complete, this is the reason why most of the people confuse the entry process with the number of visitors they can have on their website. If the entry process limit is 30, it does not mean that only 30 people can visit your website at once because the possibility of all the people accessing your website at exactly the same second will not happen unless you have a very busy website.
The processes like cron jobs, shell scripts and other commands also utilize one entry process for the time duration when they are running.
If you plan to host multiple websites on a single hosting server, a higher entry process limit will surely help a lot.
Benefits of higher entry processes limit:
- Helps in catering to large website traffic.
- Has the ability to run more scripts at one time.
- Makes the website faster, especially in case of an ecommerce website where there are many PHP scripts running for database queries.
- Prevents your website from getting suspended with high traffic spikes.
- Important for WordPress multi-site build or for running multiple web applications in one hosting account.
What Is Number Of Processes?
A standard shared server is limited to 25 simultaneous processes per cPanel. Most of the websites work perfectly with 25 concurrent processes limit. The website processes open and close so quickly that they can hardly overlap. These concurrent processes consist of IMAP, SSH connections and other processes running in the same account.
These processes are same as the entry processes; the only difference is that these processes include all the processes generated by the account or website apart from the specific page, SSH or cron jobs. If the number of processes has been crossed, error 500 or error 503 will be displayed when the website is accessed.
It is beneficial if you have many concurrent users connected to the same server at a given point of time for executing various processes like for examples for accessing emails through IMAP, FTP etc.
Conclusion:
The information mentioned above will provide you better knowledge about the important aspects that you should look for in a cheap web hosting package apart from the standard attributes. Don’t fall for unlimited storage and bandwidth unless you are aware of these important technical factors. If you are promised unlimited space but in reality if your website is getting limited, then there is no point in opting for such a web hosting plan.
