Posted on July 6th, 2010Web hosting accounts are paramount on the online business industry. Every website needs a host in order to be presented on the internet. However, not all hosting accounts are the same, and there are vast differences in the amount of control and server resources delegated to the end user in each hosting plan. For this reason web hosting services have been divided into categories such as dedicated, shared, managed, VPS, colocated and others. Each category represents a different server environment, however within each category there are various plans that allow for specific server permissions. These permissions limit the user’s ability to do a variety of things with their web hosting account, including gain unlimited amounts of traffic.
Unlimited Web Hosting Plans
If you are like 90 percent of the other web hosting account holders out there, then you probably have an “unlimited” hosting account. I am sure you were promised unlimited bandwidth and disk space, and a variety of other features that are unlimited. While the features such as unlimited email accounts and FTP accounts may hold to be true, the facts is that no hosting company offers a hosting plan with truly unlimited server resources, unless you’re using a pay-as-you-go plan which bills you depending on the amount of server resources you use. Since every server has it’s limits, every hosting account also must have limits.
Traffic Limits
While there are no specific limits placed on the amount of visitors your site can have in a specific period of time, there are limits to how much bandwidth you can use. Each time a visitors comes to your site, bandwidth is being used by the server in order to display your site in the visitors web browser. When a visitor clicks a link on your site or visits a new page, your web server has to upload that information into the temporary internet files of the visitor’s computer. This bandwidth usage directly impacts your web server, and when there are many users at your website at the same time it can take a toll on your server resources. To prevent server crashes and unreliable service, you hosting company may temporarily suspend your service and send you a warning email before reactivating your website on the server.
How to Avoid Server Limiting
The aforementioned situation usually occurs when a user has a sudden spike in traffic. While this situation can happens with all server types, it usually is most common in a shared hosting environment, since many websites will be sharing the same web server. When it does happen to a dedicated server the hosting company will still temporarily suspend service and reset the web server. The more web server resources you have, the more you traffic you will be able to bring in during a short time period. However it should be noted that traffic limitations can be caused by a hacker attack known as a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service). These attacks send a lot of artificial traffic to your website using high powered bots, which cause the server to automatically shut down for security purposes.
Conclusion
To prevent limitations causes by sudden surges in traffic, whether it be artificial traffic or genuine traffic, you will need take certain precautions. The first precaution is adequate security, and the second precaution should be having access to adequate web server resources.