When looking for a suitable web hosting solution for your website, you will come across different web hosting packages that offer different configurations of storage space, monthly bandwidth, memory, and CPU.
However, apart from these standard features, there are other important factors to consider before purchasing a hosting package:
- What is I/O? (Web Hosting I/O usage?)
- What does IOPS mean?
- What is the limit of input processes? (Entry Processes Limit?)
- What is the number of processes? (Number Of Processes?)
The factors mentioned above play a decisive role and so to speak are usually passed over in the fine print or even more easily not even mentioned by the web hosting companies to the end users.
The only way to find out about the above is after the holiday and only when you have already purchased the hosting package although again it is a matter of whether you will be able to see all of the above, which should normally be displayed in your hosting package control panel.
Occasionally, however, you can ask about these technical specifications during a pre-purchase chat, but the point is that most sellers do not know them and you should contact the technical department, while the more serious companies include the above technical information in the “Terms and Conditions”, “Fair Use Policy” or in the “Terms of Use” section.
But let’s take a closer look at what all these terms mean and how we can help you in our turn, as much as we can of course, in choosing the best hosting package for your site.
What is Web Hosting I/O Usage?
I / O usage refers to the speed of reading and writing data (I = Input, O = Output and is measured in MB/sec) from the disk to the server where your site is stored.
Disk I/O speed determines how fast any data is read or written to disk or I/O operations are performed per second on your hosting server. So the higher these values the better for you.
For example when someone visits your website or when you send or receive an email, your hosting server performs all these I/O operations.
If your server is set to low I/O speed, your website and scripts will always run slowly, no matter how much storage, bandwidth, CPU, and RAM your packages have here to mention that a slow hosting platform will make your website slow thus ruining your online reputation which can also lead to data loss and bad email communication.
Common speeds in shared hosting are no more than 1 MB/sec (tragic).
Benefits of having a higher entry/exit limit:
- You can perform more read/write data on the disk.
- Useful for hosting video streaming.
- Allows for fast execution of large scripts.
- It helps in running large queries and operations on the database.
- It prevents the website from freezing or a website from loading slowly.
What does IOPS mean?
Similar to I/O speed, IOPS refers to input-output operations per second. That is, how many “actions” (writes-reads) the disk can do per second.
IOPS are used for both traditional hard drives and SSDs. For example, a 7.2k SATA drive has about 80 IOPS.
A disk with 90K IOPS is faster than one with 79K IOPS.
In our case now on the hosting server, even though some web hosting providers promise SSD hosting, they limit the IOPS for each account to a certain value.
The most important fact to know is that the higher the IOPS, the faster your website will be.
What is the limit of input processes? Entry Processes Limit
An “Input Process” denotes the number of PHP scripts running simultaneously.
A registration process usually takes about 1 second to complete, that’s why most people confuse the login process with the number of visitors they can have on their website.
If the login process limit is 30, this does not mean that only 30 people can visit your site at once, because the ability for everyone to access your site at the same second will not happen unless you have a very busy site.
Cron processes, shell scripts, and other commands also use an input process during the time they run.
If you plan to host multiple websites on one hosting server, a higher ingress limit will help a lot.
Benefits of High Entry Process Values:
- It helps to serve high-traffic websites smoothly.
- It can run multiple scripts simultaneously.
- It makes the website faster, especially in the case of an e-commerce website where many PHP scripts are executed on database queries.
- It prevents your site from crashing when there is increased traffic.
- Important when hosting multiple sites under one hosting account, especially on WordPress sites.
What is the number of processes? Number Of Processes
A typical shared server is limited to 25 concurrent processes per cPanel. Most sites work fine with a limit of 25 concurrent processes. Processes on a site open and close so quickly that they can hardly overlap. These concurrent processes consist of IMAP connections, SSH, and other processes running on the same account.
These processes are the same as login processes, the only difference is that these processes include all processes generated by the account or website and not just one specific web page hosted on the server.
If there is a problem with the process limit then you usually get error 500 or error 503 when you try to access the website.
It is useful if you have many simultaneous users connected to the same server at a given time to perform various processes, such as accessing emails via IMAP, FTP, etc.
Conclusion:
All of the above are very important and should be taken into consideration and should always be clarified before purchasing any hosting package.
Don’t fall flat on your face when you hear about unlimited storage and bandwidth because very simple. There’s no point in having unlimited storage or unlimited bandwidth when in reality your site is limited by all of the above.