The Future of Shared Hosting

The post on Matt Heaton's blog is a little old but it is worth a mention since it is some exciting news for customers of BlueHost and HostMonster. Hosting has come a long way in a few short years. Prices have dropped while resources have increased, now days you wouldn't be hard pressed to find shared hosting around the $5 mark per month. What has hampered shared hosting and what Matt Heaton and his team of developers has almost fixed is resource allocation in a shared hosting environment. In the current shared Linux hosting environmentit is hard to determine the usage of resources by a particular user so servers at any time can slow to a crawl by just one website hogging all of the resources.

Matt and his team has spent 3 years and thousands of hours working on this issue and now are able to track and manage CPU resources and Disk I/O resources on a per user basis.

We have spent considerable time and money modifying the linux kernel and userspace applications (MySQL, Apache, etc) to report exactly which user is responsible for cpu and i/o usage in real time. Lets give an example - Lets say we have user “matt” that does a MySQL query that take 2 minutes to complete (clock time) and 90 seconds of real CPU time to complete (Actually number of CPU seconds required to complete the query). When MyQL passes the query to specific thread to be serviced we start tracking for that particular user the EXACT cpu time that was used, and the exact number of system reads and writes as well as device specific reads and writes. We can use this to track and slow down the extremely heavy users in real time so that the server is calm and available for everyone to use.

This means a website now can only use the resources allocated to it, the user is contained much like in a Virtual Private Server environment (VPS) but at less cost. No more can one website make an entire server of websites come to a standstill.

In most cases a website that hogs resources is not done intentionality, maybe Google is suddenly sending the site more traffic and the user didn't realize it. This way, not only is the other websites on the server protected but the user will be informed of any changes to his resource use as it happens as well.

For more information on these web hosts, read our BlueHost review and our HostMonster reivew.

Tag: bluehost hostmonster shared hosting linux