Web server performance metrics

[StewartR]

Can anyone out there please give me an indication as to broadly what kind of performance, in terms of page views per second / minute / hour etc., one might reasonably expect from a single high-spec web server? If it's relevant, you should assume that the vast majority of pages are served using ASP.

The reason I ask is that I'm having an interesting discussion with the people who host LensesForHire.co.uk as to whether my site's server demand is sufficient to warrant a Virtual Private Server solution (which would cost me ££££ more than I'm currently paying). We agree that my bandwidth demands are not excessive, but they're saying that it's the number of page views which is putting me in their "heavy user" category.

I know from Google Analytics how many page views my site generates. But I don't have any first-hand experience of how to put this into context: is it 90% of their (high-spec) server's capability, 10%, 1%, or what? I'll reveal this number later but I'd appreciate getting some unbiased opinions (based on real world experience if possible) as to what sort of numbers one might expect from a server.

Thanks for your help.

 

[StewartR]

I've received this by PM. I've copied it and answered it here because I thought it would be more helpful to answer it in public.

Do you have access to the root login details to your server?

If so their is a simple command to see if your server is under 'High Load' on either CPU / Memory.

.asp means its a windows box....

Root access to a server which is running dozens or hundreds of online shops? .... No.

 

[jaketame]

Half asleep this morning.

I saw 'single high-sepc web server' and assumed that you had your own server.

I see on avg. your pages are about 10-12kb in size.

Roughy how many page views an hour?

 

[arad85]

What do they mean by heavy user Stewart. I'm not sure knowing page/hr helps as it depends what the scripts are doing as to how much resource they are chewing up. Are there any particular pages which are more demanding than others that they can point to?

Not sure how bespoke your website is, but I'm building one based on PrestaShop here and there are lots of options to improve performance in the back end (caching of script compiles etc...). If you have any of those, are they all turned on?

 

[StewartR]

Roughy how many page views an hour?

I know from Google Analytics how many page views my site generates. ... I'll reveal this number later but I'd appreciate getting some unbiased opinions (based on real world experience if possible) as to what sort of numbers one might expect from a server.

I don't want to say I have X page views per hour and then people tell me whether or not that's a lot. It may bias the responses. I want people to tell me what's a lot independently.

I see on avg. your pages are about 10-12kb in size.

Hmmm. I estimate that they're typically about 225 kB in size, once you include all the images etc.

Half asleep this morning.

 

[StewartR]

What do they mean by heavy user Stewart. I'm not sure knowing page/hr helps as it depends what the scripts are doing as to how much resource they are chewing up. Are there any particular pages which are more demanding than others that they can point to?

Unfortunately I'm not getting much information from them. They just say that the number of page views my site is requiring makes me a "heavy user".

The server hosts a number of e-commerce sites, all built with basically the same technology, so I would imagine that each page view would requiore broadly the same amount of effort from the server, regardless of whose shop it is. (Of course some pages may be bigger than others. My average page is about 225 kB and there's not a load I can do to make it smaller - images are reasonably small and compressed, etc. - but then you wouldn't expect e-commerce sites to have HUGE pages.)

But I'm really at the situation of wondering whether their "high spec" server should be able to serve up 1 ASP page per hour, 1 per minute, 1 per second, 10 per second, 100 per second, etc. It's really order of magnitude stuff.

Not sure how bespoke your website is, but I'm building one based on PrestaShop here and there are lots of options to improve performance in the back end (caching of script compiles etc...). If you have any of those, are they all turned on?

No control, alas. The assumption is that the hosting company do this competently.

 

[arad85]

Unfortunately I'm not getting much information from them. They just say that the number of page views my site is requiring makes me a "heavy user".

The server hosts a number of e-commerce sites, all built with basically the same technology, so I would imagine that each page view would requiore broadly the same amount of effort from the server, regardless of whose shop it is. (Of course some pages may be bigger than others. My average page is about 225 kB and there's not a load I can do to make it smaller - images are reasonably small and compressed, etc. - but then you wouldn't expect e-commerce sites to have HUGE pages.)

Most e-commerce web sites are designed with a "Front Office" that generates the pages as they are requested. To do this, they use template files which describe the layout and they interface to some form of database system where the information is held.

When any page is rendered, the front office code requests information from the database and then processes that into what you see on the web page. The amount of work that is for your server is dependent on:

• How much data is there in the database
• How well it is stored compared to how you want to display it
• The algorithms used to generate the page from the data

I'd think it was more likely the processing load per page that you are putting on the server as opposed to the number of pages served that is causing you to be a heavy user. Can you get them to clarify a little bit?

 

[arad85]

No control, alas. The assumption is that the hosting company do this competently.

This is normally part of the back office control panel, and not something that is done by the hosting company (unless they also manage the back office for you).

 

[PhotoMonty]

Another question would be how much do you pay for the hosting? If you're on a very cheap package they may realise that you use much more of their Server than they expect for a Standard user and they therefore need more money.

 

[StewartR]

Most e-commerce web sites are designed with a "Front Office" that generates the pages as they are requested. To do this, they use template files which describe the layout and they interface to some form of database system where the information is held.

That's exactly how to looks to me.

When any page is rendered, the front office code requests information from the database and then processes that into what you see on the web page. The amount of work that is for your server is dependent on:

• How much data is there in the database
• How well it is stored compared to how you want to display it
• The algorithms used to generate the page from the data

Agreed.

I'd think it was more likely the processing load per page that you are putting on the server as opposed to the number of pages served that is causing you to be a heavy user. Can you get them to clarify a little bit?

I disagree. All the shops using this server are built on the same technology, same database, same algorithms etc. So whilst I acknowledge there will be differences from one shop to another, I think they'll be second-order. At the end of the day, most pages on most e-commerce sites are basically the same.

Can you get them to clarify a little bit?

No.

 

[StewartR]

Not sure how bespoke your website is, but I'm building one based on PrestaShop here and there are lots of options to improve performance in the back end (caching of script compiles etc...). If you have any of those, are they all turned on?

No control, alas. The assumption is that the hosting company do this competently.

This is normally part of the back office control panel, and not something that is done by the hosting company (unless they also manage the back office for you).

Really? I don't have any access to low-level stuff like that and I wouldn't expect to. My job is to design the shop to attract customers. Their job is to keep the technology running.

 

[arad85]

LOL... Sorry if I'm teaching grandma to suck eggs

BTW, in answer to the original question, I have no idea how many pages are served, but most of the cheaper server packages specify that if you use more than around of 1% of the resources, they'll come and speak to you.

 

[StewartR]

If you're on a very cheap package they may realise that you use much more of their Server than they expect for a Standard user and they therefore need more money.

They only have two packages: the "Standard" one which suits 99.7% of their users, according to the company's MD, and the enhanced one which they've suggested I move to.

I wouldn't have any objection to paying more if I were genuinely consuming a lot of server resources. But my shop is small (barely 100 products) so I'm not using much server storage. We all agree that my bandwidth usage is not enough to warrant the enhanced package. So it's just down to this issue about the demand on the server. I know how many page views my site uses, and to my mind it doesn't sound like a very high number in terms of what I'd expect their system to be able to handle. But I'm not an expert. I'm just after someone to tell me whether a well-managed high-spec server should be able to serve up 1,000,000 pages per second or 1 page per hour or whatever.

 

[arad85]

Really? I don't have any access to low-level stuff like that and I wouldn't expect to. My job is to design the shop to attract customers. Their job is to keep the technology running.

Yup really. On my PrestaShop back office system I have this:

The force compile is switched on at the moment as I'm developing the system, but server processing load is reduced and page loads are far quicker once the system is allowed to pre-compile the code...

 

[StewartR]

BTW, in answer to the original question, I have no idea how many pages are served, but most of the cheaper server packages specify that if you use more than around of 1% of the resources, they'll come and speak to you.

Well, there's nothing like that in the agreement but it's not an unreasonable approach. I'm OK with the concept of "fair usage".

I'm just trying to get a handle on whether they're feeding me a load of bull in the hope that I'll upgrade. Is 1% of their resources likely to be 100 pages per second, 1 page per hour, or what?

 

[StewartR]

Yup really. On my PrestaShop back office system I have this:

The force compile is switched on at the moment as I'm developing the system, but server processing load is reduced and page loads are far quicker once the system is allowed to pre-compile the code...

To be honest I don't see the point. Everyone is going to want all the performance enhancements turned on, all the time. I certainly would. "Everything louder than everything else."

But anyway it's moot because I don't have any controls like that.

 

[arad85]

To be honest I don't see the point. Everyone is going to want all the performance enhancements turned on, all the time. I certainly would. "Everything louder than everything else."

But anyway it's moot because I don't have any controls like that.

Yes, I agree, but my point was it is worth checking they actually are turned on as they may not be by default.

But as you say, it's a moot point if you don't have anything like that.

 

[gramps]

Stewart I can't help you with the information about how many page serves your site may or may not produce but what comes over to me is that your site appears very much to be sort of held 'ransom', i.e. you appear to have no control over it and rely upon others to keep it going.
What would you do if the company folded?
To me, the idea of a VPS would be attractive in your situation as you would be in a way 'isolated' from the other sites and there would be specific control for your site (your VP Server) rather than server wide for everyone.
Why is this better?
You should then be able to access or have someone else access your VPS control panel to help you to answer these sorts of questions and exercise some control over what is, after all, a lifeline to your business. There would also likely be advantages in being able to move more easily from your existing provider to another, should it ever become necessary.

My sites only really warrant shared hosting for size and bandwidth but I have a full server, this way even though my server is fully managed I can access at root level and have full control over what happens to it, including backups and if necessary transferring all of my sites to a new server. It costs me more but I wouldn't want to be in a position where someone else had complete control of my virtual livelihood.

Sorry if this is unwanted advice but meant in good faith.

 

[DigitalRelish]

There are so many variables involved in situations like this and you're unlikely to get any reasonable answer to your question regarding server performance without factoring in the performance of your particular back-end system.

The database queries are likely to be the greatest consumers of server resources. Your hosts will likely have tools which enable them to identify which domains and which processes are using the most in terms of CPU, memory, etc. Inefficient code means that it won't take many page renders for your site to start clawing for resources. Poor coding could mean that multiple concurrent renders compound the issue.

A possible quick win would be to see if the database can be optimised any. Over time, tables can gather 'dust' and can benefit from a spring clean. If they had the tools, analysing individual database queries could highlight inefficient code.

Another thing that's worth checking is whether there's any caching of page content available.

Sorry, there's just too many unknowns and too many variables for me to be any more specific.

A VPS is one way to ensure you get fenced off resources, but who's going to manage it? Maintaining a server, even a virtual one, is a big step from shared hosting.

 

[Dale_tem]

Your site is tiny, I cannot comment about the server you need until you give bandwidth, hits and visitor info out your site.

The Reuters blogs website is hosted on virtual servers and handles 20tb bandwidth a month.

We are on a single virtual server for our sites, traffic is about 60Gb a month and this is small.

I'm talking to lots of different companies with lots of different solutions, if you want to talk numbers via pm or email let me know.

Fyi we are moving to a virtual active-active cluster with 8 sites balanced across them to provide instant failover. This at a rough guess would be ott for your needs.

 

[StewartR]

Thanks to all those who have contributed thoughts.

I guess there are too many variables involved for me to get the simple answer I'd like. But here's the killer stat: my site generates roughly 1 page view per 10 seconds at peak times. (That's right: 73,000 page views in the month, according to Google Analytics.)

I'm struggling to see how that can be much of a strain for a high-spec server. Admittedly it's shared with about 50 other sites, but the point that I'm trying to make to the hosting company is that my site surely can't be making an appreciable difference to the server's performance. Can it???

(Incidentally, thanks to all the people who've suggested alternative hosting solutions. That wouldn't be an easy step for me because it's not just the hosting that I get from my current providers: it's also the content management and the checkout system. I've got a fair amount of time and effort invested in that platform, and moving away from it would be a big step. It's a step I'll have to take one day, but ideally only when I'm ready - and can afford - to integrate the web site properly with our operations management database. That won't be cheap.)

 

[Richard King]

In my experience, there are a few things that make a difference

1. How many other sites are you sharing the server with?
2. What are you running on it?
3. How big the pipe is going to the server?
4. The server spec
5. the local infrastructure for the server
6. how busy is your site

In detail.. if you are sharing the server with loads of other sites, then it is irrelevant if it is the best speced server out there. you NEED TO KNOW this. If there are 10 sites on the server, it is a totally different proposition to 100, or 1000 sites. This in a way is the most important metric - as it determines your slice of the pie for CPU usage, RAM usage, and bandwidth

The local infrastructure and server build is also important. If your server needs to access a SQL database across a competitively slow busy network, your site performance will be impacted

If you are streaming video, this is extremely CPU, bandwidth intensive, and thats why some hosts have a 5% cap on CPU usage

Some e-commerce packages are very server dependant, and use a lot of memory and processor power... again, you may be serving a small lightweight page, but the engine that produces it may be doing a LOT of work

Some e-commerce packages require a specific server environment too

 

[arad85]

I guess there are too many variables involved for me to get the simple answer I'd like. But here's the killer stat: my site generates roughly 1 page view per 10 seconds at peak times. (That's right: 73,000 page views in the month, according to Google Analytics.)

I know that doesn't sound much, but if each page takes 0.2 secs of CPU to generate, that's 2% of their resource.

Might be a good idea to ask them what their fair usage policy is and see if that stacks up with them asking you to move to a higher cost package.

 

[Dale_tem]

If you go Virtual, you are sharing around 1/20th to 1/16th of a server. This will give you a perfomance upgrade and starts at around £50 a month. BUT the unknown factor is the size/performance of the overall server, you are getting 1/20 of what? Virtual Servers are hard to compare without looking at the underlying hardware.

As I said via PM, your site is the 56,000th busiest in the UK.

You don't need to move away from the platform (unless they are requesting you use their hosting, which I don't think they are) when you move hosting. We used an OSCommerce site and its more or less a case of backup database, restore database and copy files.

 

[DigitalRelish]

If you go Virtual, you are sharing around 1/20th to 1/16th of a server. This will give you a perfomance upgrade and starts at around £50 a month. BUT the unknown factor is the size/performance of the overall server, you are getting 1/20 of what? Virtual Servers are hard to compare without looking at the underlying hardware.

Are these figures from the OP's host?

As I said via PM, your site is the 56,000th busiest in the UK.

You don't need to move away from the platform (unless they are requesting you use their hosting, which I don't think they are) when you move hosting. We used an OSCommerce site and its more or less a case of backup database, restore database and copy files.

I always take third party metrics with a pinch of salt. Not that they're particularly relevant here anyway.

The OP will have to consider the associated cost and consequence of any platform move especially if it's away from the hardware controlled by the host. Only he can say whether it's a viable option as we don't know the full extent of the services they provide.

 

[DigitalRelish]

I'm struggling to see how that can be much of a strain for a high-spec server. Admittedly it's shared with about 50 other sites, but the point that I'm trying to make to the hosting company is that my site surely can't be making an appreciable difference to the server's performance. Can it???

You may not necessarily be straining the server on your own, but let's suppose your site is the busiest on the server by a good margin. All else being equal, you could be using several times the amount of resources as the next busiest site on the server. From the host's point of view, they might be able to fit on another few sites in place of yours if you were to be migrated to another server.

It all depends on what your host determined to be the threshold before you need to start considering alternative hosting. Whatever it is, I guess you've reached it.

 

[Dale_tem]

Are these figures from the OP's host?

Generalised VP server stats, ie you get a percentage of a servers (generally between 16 - 20 accounts per server), the server itself can change depending on the company, hence you cannot compare 1 virtual to 1 virtual in terms of cost without knowing the ratio and the hardware specs.

I always take third party metrics with a pinch of salt. Not that they're particularly relevant here anyway.

That was from Alexa which is pretty reliable, but it gives an indication of how busy it is and its a busy site, just small size.

The OP will have to consider the associated cost and consequence of any platform move especially if it's away from the hardware controlled by the host. Only he can say whether it's a viable option as we don't know the full extent of the services they provide.

The current webhost doesn't inspire me with confidence from the outside....

http://www.ekmhosting.com/overview.asp

I would say webhosting is more of a byproduct from what they do, not what their main business is and not what the specialise in (only 2 packages)

Windows 2000? Hmmmm

 

[DigitalRelish]

That's the thing, different hosts will mount differing numbers of VPS's on different servers. So, we don't know exactly what's being offered to the OP.

I appreciate people like to use Alexa to gauge site traffic, but their stats are only as good as the data they base them on. Anyway, we know what the page view stats are for the OP's site and whilst they're not massive I can see them being eligible for upgrading from most shared hosting plans especially as it's got a database back-end.

 

[Dale_tem]

That's the thing, different hosts will mount differing numbers of VPS's on different servers. So, we don't know exactly what's being offered to the OP.

Hence what I said

I appreciate people like to use Alexa to gauge site traffic, but their stats are only as good as the data they base them on. Anyway, we know what the page view stats are for the OP's site and whilst they're not massive I can see them being eligible for upgrading from most shared hosting plans especially as it's got a database back-end.

Knowing the number of hits your site is receiving is one thing, but you need to be able to compare it and yes I know it is very hard to compare 1 site to another. It is a starting point.

 

[StewartR]

OK people, rather than you all speculate about what my position might or might not be, let me provide you with some information.

As noted above, my site is hosted by EKM. They're not a dedicated hosting company, so I don't think the quality or otherwise of their pure hosting offering is meaningful. But they are (I believe) the UK's biggest provider of e-commerce solutions. My web site is one of about 9,000 built using their tools, technology and templates. I believe they run their own servers in the UK but I don't know that for a fact and I don't really care.

The point of mentioning this is that I can't just transfer to a different host. I would need to re-design and re-build the web site from the ground up. It's a step I need to take one day, maybe soon, but it's not an easy fix.

The main metric EKM use to judge the size of their clients' sites is bandwidth. I think that's pretty reasonable. Bearing in mind that all the sites are built using the same tools and technology, and they're all e-commerce sites. Yes, some will have larger page sizes than others, but nobody running an e-commerce site wants to have huge pages, so there won't be orders of magnitude of variation here. In this context, bandwidth is a fairly reasonable metric to use as a proxy for things like server resources etc.

EKM's "fair usage" agreement allows for 45 GB per month of bandwidth. My site is way inside that - in September I used 16 GB.

However EKM have pointed out to me that, whilst bandwidth is a reasonable proxy for other metrics such as server load, it's not infallible. After all 1,000,000 x 1kB pages will hit the server harder than 1,000 x 1MB pages. But they're telling me that, basically, my site is causing a disproportionate amount of work for the server.

Which is why I've been looking at page views and puzzling over this metric. Remember, all the sites on this server use the same tools and technology, so you would expect each of them to be generating broadly the same amount of load on the server per page view. And that's where I get confused. I simply cannot believe that my demand of 1 page view per 10 seconds will make any kind of appreciable difference to a "high spec" server which is only hosting 48 sites.

I know that doesn't sound much, but if each page takes 0.2 secs of CPU to generate, that's 2% of their resource.

That's true so far as it goes, but I don't believe the numbers can be anything like that. It's a high-spec server with 8 cores and umpety-ump gigabytes of RAM. It should be capable of serving dozens or hundreds of pages per second, surely, rather than just a handful. Shouldn't it?

You may not necessarily be straining the server on your own, but let's suppose your site is the busiest on the server by a good margin. All else being equal, you could be using several times the amount of resources as the next busiest site on the server. From the host's point of view, they might be able to fit on another few sites in place of yours if you were to be migrated to another server.

Again, that's true as far as it goes, but I don't believe it reflects the situation. If my site were the busiest by far, then what on earth is causing the server problems? Even if my site is only average for the server, that means the peak throughput is only 5 pages per second. It comes back to the fact that I believe a properly-configured properly-managed high-spec server should have a considerably higher throughput. Shouldn't it?

Bottom line, I've been challenging EKM to confirm that my demand of 6 pages per minute is enough for them to be concerned about. My common-sense view says that it's not a big proportion of the server resources, and certainly not enough to warrant an upgrade to a VPS. (For which I would pay an extra 650%, by the way. The basic EKM package is very good value but the VPS looks like very bad value.) Up until Wednesday EKM were insisting that my site was causing problems. Now since yesterday they seem to have changed their tune. I suspect they've discovered some sort of problem in their server infrastructure which is limiting the throughput. I've been promised a solution by Tuesday, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[arad85]

That's true so far as it goes, but I don't believe the numbers can be anything like that. It's a high-spec server with 8 cores and umpety-ump gigabytes of RAM. It should be capable of serving dozens or hundreds of pages per second, surely, rather than just a handful. Shouldn't it?

Until you know how much CPU it takes to generate a page, it's all pure speculation. Serving a page only really uses bandwidth, it's generating the page that causes the server load.

Still, looks like they have changed their tune - be interested to see what Tuesday brings.

 

[Dale_tem]

The point of mentioning this is that I can't just transfer to a different host. I would need to re-design and re-build the web site from the ground up. It's a step I need to take one day, maybe soon, but it's not an easy fix.

Wrong.

We have a custom db which is as complicated if not more than what you have. It took 3 hours to transfer.

Your website is made up of 2 things, a database and a files. The basic idea is you backup the database and restore and you move your files.

You can move your site and it is not hard for someone with experience to do (we are talking minimum amount of work)

I said earlier your site is tiny - there is nothing big on your site, no 200Mb downloads. However you have lots and lots of queries loading small amounts of data. This is causing a higher load on the server than having lots of large files being downloaded.

1 page load isn't a single file. Your pages are dynamic, so on every page you have some static items, but others are stored in the database and the page is built for the user each time it is requested.

A simple HTML page is simple to load, the same file is loaded each time. PHP or ASP are dynamic, the content could be different for each load, so it loads a number of things from a database for each page view.

If you are paying £9.99 a month for your hosting, you aren't going to get a good host and your site has outgrown it.

The limitation of the sever is not the RAM or CPU, it is the disk. You only have a small amount of RAM, say 512Mb given to you, this is probably not big enough for your database to sit in and so it has to read and write the data to a the hard disk, it has to share the hard disk access with 48 other sites.

A Virtual server can/will give you more RAM and allow more of your database to be stored in memory and so less load on your server.

It is the hard disk access due to limited RAM that is causing your performance issue

You can do database tuning as Digital suggested, but they might not be very good at it or have no knowledge of it.

 

[DigitalRelish]

Stewart, I think you're on the right track by challenging the host as a first course of action. They should be able to justify their position and hopefully they won't just bend arbitrary stats to point the finger in your direction.

There's still not enough information here for anyone to make a reasoned call on this. For all we know, your site may just be a satellite hanging off a centralised back-end which makes migrating to another host impossible due to licensing. We just don't know and it might require a more considered approach rather than taking a purely technical one.

 

[Dale_tem]

Stewart, I think you're on the right track by challenging the host as a first course of action. They should be able to justify their position and hopefully they won't just bend arbitrary stats to point the finger in your direction.

There's still not enough information here for anyone to make a reasoned call on this. For all we know, your site may just be a satellite hanging off a centralised back-end which makes migrating to another host impossible due to licensing. We just don't know and it might require a more considered approach rather than taking a purely technical one.

The software used for the site is free open source software.

I have never come across a shared or VPS server use any more than a single hardware RAID array in any of the options.

A shared server like you are own is a lot of sites sharing CPU, memory and a single hard disk array. The limiting factor is 40 - 50 customers sharing 1 hard disk array.

A virtual server changes it to around 20 customers, you may get a small increase in RAM and CPU, but you will have a lot better hard disk access as there is less people using the hard disk, they may even use a better array.

A dedicated server will give you lots of CPU and RAM, but ultimately it will give you the hard disk yourself

In any system, the hard disk is the device limiting the speed.

 

[DigitalRelish]

Again, we don't know for sure what sort of infrastructure is being used for the OP's website.

 

[Dale_tem]

Again, we don't know for sure what sort of infrastructure is being used for the OP's website.

Price says its not complex, it is a single RAID array its not financiably viable to use any more

£10 a month x 50 = £500 a month and so £6000 a year. To make money from this, power, bandwidth, replace the server every 3 years, it can be nothing more than a basic server.

We haven't been told the specs, but the economics tell us.

 

[DigitalRelish]

Okay, you're talking hardware config, but I'm talking about software. The OP's site could be dependent upon a centralised database, for example. This also could make migrating it to another host impossible.

Again, we just don't know all the facts.

 

[StewartR]

Dale, you're making a lot of speculation based on few facts. I appreciate that you're trying to help, but much of your supposition is - I believe - wrong.

Your website is made up of 2 things, a database and a files. The basic idea is you backup the database and restore and you move your files.

You can move your site and it is not hard for someone with experience to do (we are talking minimum amount of work)

Three things, actually. The third is the suite of back-end administrative tools. That's software developed by EKM and it wouldn't be transferable.

If you are paying £9.99 a month for your hosting, you aren't going to get a good host and your site has outgrown it.

I'm not.

The limitation of the sever is not the RAM or CPU, it is the disk. You only have a small amount of RAM, say 512Mb given to you, this is probably not big enough for your database to sit in and so it has to read and write the data to a the hard disk, it has to share the hard disk access with 48 other sites.

A Virtual server can/will give you more RAM and allow more of your database to be stored in memory and so less load on your server.

It is the hard disk access due to limited RAM that is causing your performance issue

I'm afraid I'm not convinced by this analysis, for two reasons. Firstly, if the RAM on the server were divided equally between all the shops using the server, then my shop's allocation would be more than enough to hold my entire database. As you said, it's not big. Secondly, so far as I am aware there is a shared database on the server. That means that the server RAM does not need to be partitioned/allocated anyway, which i think undermines your argument.

The software used for the site is free open source software.

Not entirely. There is open-source software underpinning it (osCommerce I believe) but EKM have added layers of content management and site administration tools.

£10 a month x 50 = £500 a month and so £6000 a year. To make money from this, power, bandwidth, replace the server every 3 years, it can be nothing more than a basic server.

We haven't been told the specs, but the economics tell us.

EKM have around 9000 customers of whom 99% pay £20 per month and the rest pay more. Their total income is therefore around £200,000 per month, which is £2.4M per year, and they have about 40 servers. That's £60,000 per server per year, not £6,000.

 

[Dale_tem]

You can work out quite a lot of the facts by looking around the net and having spent weeks looking at hosting, meeting with hosts etc. you learn how it all works.

There might be a shared database engine, I would of presumed each shop would have its own database in the shared engine. However there can be security issues associated with that, so seperate databases would be better.

On all Virtual servers/shared servers, you are allotted servers. It is to prevent 1 site running away with the server.

The underpinning software is presta.

9000 customers over 40 servers? Thats over 200 customers per server?

Their numbers don't match up.

 

[DigitalRelish]

On all Virtual servers/shared servers, you are allotted servers. It is to prevent 1 site running away with the server.

Ooookkkkaaaayyyy, I'm just going to back away slowly from this thread now as I'm not sure this is helping Stewart any, but I will question the sweeping generalisation above and say it's just not true. A single (or multiple shared) web server process can serve pages for multiple website domains all hosted on the same server and this is the approach that some hosting set-ups may take i.e. if one website domain spirals out of control taking the web server process down with it then all sites on the same server will be impacted.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the best approach to take, but what I've quoted is simply untrue assuming I've interpreted the meaning correctly.