Website Hosting - Server Load Average

How busy are the processors on your server? If they are overloaded, the response time will be slow. Many cheap web hosting services cram thousands of websites onto one machine. They may say "unlimited bandwidth" and "unlimited space," but they are counting on the fact that no one actually uses what they claim to offer. In the meantime, all of those websites crammed onto the server are competing for the same system resources.

So how do you measure server load? A key statistic to look for is the 1, 5 and 15 minute server load average. Basically, server load averages below 1.0 (single core processor) or 4.0 (such as on Maine.Info quad-core processors) are best, as it means that the amount of tasks waiting to be processed are fewer than the available processor cycles. If tasks exceed processors, then there are more jobs waiting to be processed than there are available processor cycles. The result? Some processes must wait. See Understanding Linux CPU Load and Wikipedia, CPU Load.

At Maine.Info, you will be on a web hosting server that is severely under-utilized. Our 1, 5, 15 minute server load averages are substantially below 4.0 on our quad-core processors. For example see our realtime Server 1 data below: