Comments on: Feedback: CPU Usage

By: Svetlana Hallum

Svetlana Hallum — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:10:40 +0000

Very interesting post thanks for sharing I have added your website to my bookmarks and will be back By the way this is off topic but I really like your blogs layout.

By: Processor Benchmark

Processor Benchmark — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:13:15 +0000

Sweet…. This is what I’m looking for

By: Jules

Jules — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 07:12:25 +0000

@Pat: It’s safe to say that they’ll be more expensive when compared to larger hosts, such as HostGator. The reason for this is that they can obtain significant discounts when purchasing in bulk, something we don’t have the privilege of right now.

As a ballpark, our lowest specification server will be around $160/month. Expect to pay around $280 for a quad core server with 8GB RAM and all the other bells and whistles.

Server management and advanced monitoring will cost extra.

By: Pat G.

Pat G. — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:57:08 +0000

This seems fairly reasonable.
@ The comment about Dedicated Solutions, do you have any ballpark figures for how much these will cost customers?
Will they be in the range of Hostgator, or Blz.in?
You most likely won’t answer my questions, but oh well. Gonna ask em anyways.

By: Jules

Jules — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:49:56 +0000

To be honest, with the approximate figures we’re looking at, very few people should be concerned with their usage. It’s certainly something we’ll look to add to their client area in the near future so people can get an idea how they fair.

For those interested, we’re looking at a threshold of roughly 90 CPU minutes a day. To give you some idea of how much that is, the “average” site on our servers appears to use less than 30 in a 24 hour period. Naturally sites will differ greatly, but we’re confident this shouldn’t be something that should worry most people. As with the MySQL quota, if it was something that would affect more than only a very very small number of people, we would discard the idea immediately. Don’t forget, CPU usage is something that can also be decreased by way of caching or other optimisation. It’s not something we can implement for you, but there are plugins for various applications that can reduce this significantly.

By: mro

mro — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:31:27 +0000

Some hosts are able to apply a calculation to their CPU usage and then specify a unit count for the server load from that site. How about introducing something similar so we’re all able to accurately monitor our usage and perhaps identify which of our scripts are putting the server on load.

By: Jules

Jules — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:29:18 +0000

Of course, we’d only offer services provided by us, but naturally customers may want to search around for other offers that are out there. Honestly, it’s hard to be price competitive these days so it’s understandable when you get to the increased pricing of VPS and dedicated options that people begin to want to try and minimalise the expenditure. Obviously they’d miss our amazing service though

We just want people to know we’ll be with them until the end

By: Darfuria

Darfuria — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:24:22 +0000

I think it would be a shame to see you guys recommend a third party host in that situation. Whilst that’s great customer service, right up until the end, seeing you implement a solution yourselves and continue to provide the fantastic service you do would be a much better option.

By: Jules

Jules — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:34:54 +0000

Thanks for reading it in a positive way, Darfuria

We have VPS and dedicated options planned in the near future, so there would certainly be other solutions available. If our solutions aren’t within budget, we’re more than happy to assist users moving elsewhere that is within their budget. Our clients are important to us, so we’ll do everything we can to ensure they’re on a solution that’s right for them. Websites (usually) only grow in traffic and popularity, so being on the right platform will make expansion much easier in the future.

Agreed. If you’re receiving the kind of hits we expect to be over usage (~700,000/day), monetising your site should help significantly to fund an alternate solution.

By: Darfuria

Darfuria — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:24:51 +0000

I think it’s very fair. I think if you proceeded by informing customers of their CPU usage and how that scales with their expectations and the average of other websites/accounts on the server, and then offer those who are consuming more resources than you are comfortable with for a shared hosting package a solution that suits them better, then that would work very well.

Users who are getting that amount of traffic on their website have a huge opportunity to monetise anyway. Not that monetising is exclusive to large-traffic websites.