Server overloads at big companies
Nowadays we read a lot of reviews that large hosting companies provide low-cost hosting packages which are located on overloaded servers. Low price doesn’t mean quality sometimes and very often even the top world hosting providers face the problems with the overload.
There is no doubt that the top providers, like Godaddy, Hostgator (http://www.hostgator.com 
) or Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com ) have powerful servers and the newest hardware, but in some cases this is not the key factor for the appearance of the site performance problems and server overloads.
The main cause of the problems can be that the servers of the big hosting providers are overcrowded and there is not enough resources for them to work properly as the server can’t restrain the loads they create by their scripts, databases or mail sendings.
There can be a number of reasons for high load on the server and the most common are:
- High volume of traffic
- A great number of processes running from one domain simultaneously
- Incorrect configuration of web server ( Apache or Nginx) and Mysql
- Huge CPU usage from VPN connections,antiviruses like drweb and clamd, php processes
- Crashed database
- Network port not large enough to handle the amount of connections.
- Not enough storage space to handle all the data
- Too many database queries.
- Cron jobs running very frequently
- Mass mail sending( Spam)
- Slow hard disk drives
- Unoptimized software
So, in order to know if the servers of the large companies are overstuffed with customers, we have decided to perform a test of 10 different websites from 10 different hosting companies, which are at the top of the list among the best providers in hosting industry.
| Company | Site name | Number of server neighbors |
| Bluehost | netartmedia.net | 2,725 |
| Godaddy | mlbtraderumors.com | 5,282,598 |
| One.com | sham24.in | 123 |
| Endurance | enduranceplanet.com | 746 |
| WebsiteWelcome | joinsociety.com | 3 |
| Amazon | megaclick.com | 3 |
| Media Temple | bollyfm.net | 5 |
| bollybite.com | 1,000,738 | |
| Сloudflare | musonline.com | 9 |
| Automattic | allthingsd.com | 4 |
Then, we decided to analyze the servers of the 5 smaller web hosting companies in order to compare which servers are more overcrowded and thus overloaded.
| Company | Site name | Number of server neighbors |
| Liquid Web | bediddle.com | 4 |
| Jaguarpc | 1080pwallpaper.com | 131 |
| avahost | avahost.net | 5 |
| Hostony | cpostock.com | 22 |
| Fastnext | admurtnigltd.com | 210 |
The results didn’t surprise us so much, but still for some companies they are quite unexpected.Of course, we should consider the fact that we analyzed only a couple of servers and it can be so that one server has thousand of customers hosted on one ip at the same time and the other is almost empty.But a general picture can be seen after our investigation. There is no doubt that hosting titans are hosting thousand and millions of domains on a single server.Their servers are 100% powerful and have the latest software, but even in spite of this, the quantity of clients they host is badly influencing the server speed and creates a high load average from time to time.
The small hosting companies which are listed above don’t have such “crowds of clients” on their servers, but still can be overloaded anytime because of the users’ scripts or some hardware issues( like slow hard disk drives or insufficient number of memory slots).
So, it is really hard for a customer to determine the real cause of the server overload, unless you are not the server administrator, but all in all we can believe in myth that large companies have constant server loads caused by a great number of clients hosted on their sites.
