Is Your Website Too Big For Shared Hosting?

We’re often asked in our pre-sales department how do we know if a website is too big for shared hosting. 

I’ll admit, this is a tough question to answer, because there isn’t a clear cut answer.

If you have a single html page website with no scripting, few images, etc. it can most likely handle hundreds of thousands of visitors no problem.

But when you start adding in scripts, database calls, etc. things start to get much more complicated.

We make our cloud hosting limits public

I don’t really consider us a “shared web host” as you may think of it as all of our Web Hosting and Reseller Hosting are built on top of our public cloud meaning we can essentially add more resources with the click of a button.

We don’t use traditional “old school” dedicated servers that have to be shutdown for a simple RAM upgrade.

Because of this, we’re able to place limits on the amount of RAM, CPU, and memory usage that each cPanel account uses.

To keep things simple, our resource limits are the same for all of our hosting packages (including Resellers) except for our Basic Business package.

Our Basic Business package is a “step in between” our Web Hosting and VPS Hosting as it allows the ability to purchase more RAM.  You can choose between 1GB (standard), 2GB, and 4GB.

Name Hero cPanel Account Limits

With that said, we publish these limits inside of our knowledgebase:

• Disk Space: Allocate from master plan
• Bandwidth: Allocate from master plan
• Virtual Memory: 2048MB (2GB)
• Physical Memory: 1024MB (1GB)
• Concurrent Connections: 25
• Number of Processes: 100
• I/O Limit: 2048KB/s
• I/O operations per second: 1024
• Inodes (soft/hard): 100,000 / 250,000

For the majority of small business and blogger-type websites, these limits are plenty.  However, for those that need “more juice” we allow you the ability to monitor this from right inside of cPanel so you can make the decision rather you need to upgrade to a VPS or optimize your scripts.

How To View Your Resource Usage

Some of the larger hosting brands will simply suspend your account if you overuse your CPU allocation.  I feel like that’s bad practice as the average website owner isn’t going to know what is causing it to use too many resources.

Rather than guessing, we place these limits directly inside of cPanel, and if you encroach on a limit, we take snapshots of the processes causing concern:

As you can see in the example above, the problem is with the wp-cron.php file.  It could be you have a very large database and need to manually run the cron.  You would probably want to test disabling it (add to wp-config define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);) and then try running it once an hour manually (i.e. wget https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1).

CPU & Memory In cPanel

When you login to your cPanel you can navigate to the CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage icon to find the above snapshots:

If you’ve had issues within the past 24 hours, you’ll notice a message:

For most websites it was an isolated incident that only occurred when something such as a cronjob ran and there is no need for concern.  If it frequently happens to the point of your visitors getting a 503 site not available error, then it’s probably time to start looking at a VPS hosting package.

How to monitor your usage

I recorded a short video tutorial to help you navigate through cPanel and monitor your resource usage to see if you need to upgrade hosting packages:

Remember, since we’re on our own private cloud, we can upgrade any web hosting package at anytime.  Even if you start with a 2GB VPS, we can scale you up yo the 8GB with just a couple of clicks and minimal downtime.

Let us know if you have any questions getting setup on the right package for your website!

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.