So why should webmasters be concerned about this? Mainly, because this is what is going to limit the growth of your website in a shared hosting environment. Now days, most hosts offer unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited add on domains. That sounds like a real deal for under $10 a month. What they know is that your website’s limitations won’t come from how much space or bandwidth you use… but the server resources that your site requires to run.

Raw HTML is getting to be more and more a thing of the past. It’s where I started my website design and it was a great little coding language to learn as a newcomer to the web… ten or eleven years ago. Now, everything serious is running on content management systems, usually some sort of php program. And while things like WordPress are lovely and easy to use, they also demand far more in the way of server resources than the old regular HTML sites did.

Each time a single WordPress page is loaded, it makes queries to the host which enables it to run various bells and whistles. Got a really neat poll plugin that adds a widget to your sidebar? Add some more load. Installed that great plugin that gives you a slideshow art gallery. Add some more load. How about that neat little Twitter plugin? Yep. Add some more load.

Do this for every single time a new page or plugin loads. Every single visitor your site gets. Add in all those crazy bots. Before you know it, your site is requesting far more of the CPU than your shared hosting environment allows you to. Afterall, they host more than just your websites from their server (that’s the meaning of shared hosting). So if your scripts are bogging the server down, all the websites hosted there will feel it.

It’s fair enough to understand why they would pull the plug on you if your site is a CPU hog. Different hosts handle this in different ways – it also may depend on how much resources you were using. I’ll get into that discussion next time.

Suffice to say, when looking for a shared host to grow your WordPress site or blog, CPU and RAM limits are rarely highlighted in the package. Be sure to do your homework and find out what the caps are – if they are hard or soft. What happens to a site that exceeds the limits? And if you have concerns about the size of your site, contacting support would be a good way to ask your questions and get a feel for how the particular hosting company works.

My previous web host, Lunarpages, caps CPU usage at under 1% for a 24 hour period. At least, that’s what support told me when they reported that my usage was too high. After having unresolved issues with this host, I shopped around and found that this isn’t the standard everywhere else. I am currently trying out Hostgator, who has a limit of 25% of CPU usage for a duration of 90 seconds at a time. Unlike Lunarpages, Hostgator actually gives users a way to monitor their own resource usage from the control panel – which has been a huge plus for me. I’ll be posting a comparison of these two hosts and my experiences with them soon.

The bottom line is, do research on the resources before you choose a webhost! Unlimited doesn’t really mean absolutely unlimited and these hosts know it!

Related posts:

• What happens when your site exceeds shared hosting CPU resource limit
• How to troubleshoot a WordPress site that is using too many CPU resources