On our Small Business Web Hosting, Web Hosting Pro, and Web Hosting Advanced shared hosting accounts we indicate a maximum number of accounts per server.The low down is this. We use virtual server technology to create multiple servers so that we don’t put hundreds of web hosting accounts onto a single server. A note about Shared Web Hosting To understand the concept of a maximum number of websites per server, you should understand exactly what shared web hosting is.

Shared web hosting, as its name implies, is a server running many separate web hosting accounts. This means that your web site is one web site in a large number of websites, much like you may have many working folders on your own PC.

As the image to the left shows, each web hosting account on the server is like a new hole in a bucket, consuming resources. The more web hosting accounts, the less resources there are available. Too many websites on a single server and things could get nasty!

How many web hosting accounts do we have per server?

Why do we have a low number of web hosting accounts per server?

It has to do with a number of factors:

1. Resource usage: Each web hosting account consumes resources, ie, memory, processing power, bandwidth, etc. By keeping the number of web hosting accounts per server low, we maintain a much higher grade of service than you’re used to!
2. Closely related to that is the effect of a sudden spike in traffic on several websites. If all the shared hosting accounts were on one server, then a spike in traffic and resource usage could affect ALL web hosting accounts. By splitting web hosting accounts up we can minimise or eliminate that effect.
3. Badly coded websites are not disastrous and are easier to find. Similarly to point 2 above, if one or two websites are coded badly and have “memory leaks” or long loops which cause high resource consumption, they could affect the whole server and all accounts on it. By keeping the number of web hosting accounts low per server its much easier to find and work with the owners to correct this, but it also means that it doesn’t compromise all web hosting accounts.
4. Its safer for security. If one website owner has a site which is easily hacked (uses weak passwords, etc), it cannot affect all sites on the server meaning that recovery is much, much faster (note that our server security set up generally means that hacking of a site due to poor FTP passwords, etc will be limited to that site only anyway. Still, better safe than sorry!).
5. WordPress and Joomla optimised. The Web Hosting Pro and Web Hosting Advanced accounts have a maximum number of 10 and 5 web hosting accounts per server respectively. This means a very low impact on the servers. This means that CMS sites like WordPress and Joomla which require more resources run properly. Because of the low number of sites, we are also able to set much higher limits of memory usage per website.