Web Hosting For Resource Intensive Sites

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

There are many kinds of sites on the internet, from small to medium to large. The small websites you often see online are usually hosted on a shared server. A shared hosting plan is the most commonly purchased hosting solution in the web hosting business. The majority of online websites are small to medium sized, so they don’t need some fancy hosting environment. However, the large websites can’t be stable on a shared hosting account, as it could be resource intensive at times. A resource intensive site is one that uses a large portion of the memory and processing power. If you are on a shared server and you use the bulk of the processing power, it will affect all the other sites on the server.

What is a resource intensive site?

Let’s look at those who want to start a resource intensive site. Are you unsure of whether your website will be resource intensive or not? Any website that uses special scripts or server software’s will often use processing power and memory as it functions. For example, a proxy website will be extremely resource intensive and it would not function on a regular shared server. For hosting proxy websites, you will need dedicated servers that are optimized to do the job. Certain websites that serve thousands or millions of users are considered to be resource intensive as well. Take the search engine Yahoo for example, it receives millions of users on a daily basis, and therefore it will cause unlevelled load balances on the server.

The best place for a memory intensive site is a dedicated server. A dedicated server unlike a shared server is only for you, and you have the opportunity to use all of the power on one single site. Dedicated servers can be made according to custom specifications, with you providing exact amounts of hard drive space, memory and processors. Most individuals purchase a dedicated server right off the rack, because it is just simpler and cheaper to do so. The costs of dedicated servers have gone down quite a bit in the past three years, so this shouldn’t be a concern for you as well.

If you think a dedicated server would be pushing it, you could certainly go for something a bit smaller in range, such as a virtual private server. A VPS hosting plan is very similar to shared hosting, but it is a dedicated solution. A virtual private server is setup by creating partitions on a dedicated server. You will be sharing a dedicated server with a few others, but your partition will only house your website, and will not affect that of the others. If your VPS has a total memory of 1GB, you get to use all of it, rather than having to share it with someone else.

When purchasing a VPS hosting plan, you should make sure that the company offers support service, as you will end up needing it. Some hosting companies expect the clients to know everything, so you should always confirm before purchasing.