All You Need To Know About Web Hosting I/O Usage, IOPS Limit And Entry Processes Limit

You may encounter a variety of web hosting packages that offer varying configurations of RAM, CPU, storage space, and monthly bandwidth when searching for a suitable web hosting solution for your website. However, in addition to the conventional considerations, the following additional crucial criteria should be taken into account before registering for a web hosting package:

• What is web hosting I/O usage?
• What does IOPS mean?
• What Is Entry Processes Limit?
• What Is Number Of Processes?

The factors mentioned above are extremely crucial considerations and usually they are not mentioned by the web hosting companies to the end users. You can only know about these factors when you purchase the web hosting package. You will be able to see the I/O usage, IOPS, entry processes and number of processes in your web hosting control panel only if your web host allows these specifications to be displayed.

At times, you can ask about these technical specifications during a pre-sales chat or email query; however, there will be few sales people who know about them.

Some web hosting providers include these factors in technical information that is mentioned in a small print in the ‘Terms and Conditions’, ‘Fair Usage Policy’ or in the ‘Terms of Use’ section.

Let’s have a deeper look at these factors so that you can make a better decision about choosing the right web hosting solution.

What Is Web Hosting I/O Usage?

The disk input and output (I/O) is referred to as web hosting I/O consumption. The disk I/O speed indicates the maximum speed at which your hosting server’s programs or website can perform input and output activities per second. Consequently, the greater the I/O range, the better. Your hosting server handles the I/O activities when someone visits your website or when you send or receive emails.

Your website and scripts will always operate slowly if your server has low I/O speed set, regardless of the amount of storage, bandwidth, CPU, and RAM that is included in your web hosting subscription. A sluggish hosting platform will cause your website to load slowly, harming its reputation online. It can also cause data loss and poor email correspondence.

Offering a higher I/O is expensive for the web hosting providers which is why they do not allow more than 1 MB/s disk I/O speed on a shared server.

Benefits of having a higher I/O limit:

• More read/write data can be executed on the disk.
• Useful for hosting videos and downloading or streaming on the website.
• Enables large scripts to run faster.
• Helps in the execution of large database queries and operations.
• Prevents website freeze or slow loading of a website with heavy scripts.

What Does IOPS Mean?

Similar to the I/O speed, IOPS refers to Inputs Outputs Per Second. IOPS determines the speed at which a hard drive reads data from and writes data to a hard drive. IOPS is used for both traditional spinning hard drives and SSD drives. For instance a 7.2k SATA drive contains about 80 IOPS. When it comes to a hosting server, even though some web hosting providers provide SSD hosting, but in reality they limit the IOPS for every account to a certain value. The most important fact for you to know is that the higher the IOPS, the faster your website will be.

 What Is Entry Processes Limit?

The quantity of PHP scripts that are executing simultaneously is shown by a “Entry Process.” Because entry processes typically take one second to finish, most people mistakenly associate entry processes with the volume of visitors that a website can receive. The chance of all visitors accessing your website at precisely the same moment is unlikely unless your website is extremely active, thus even if the entry process restriction is set at thirty, this does not mean that only thirty individuals can visit your website at once.

The processes like cron jobs, shell scripts and other commands also utilize one entry process for the time duration when they are running.

If you plan to host multiple websites on a single hosting server, a higher entry process limit will surely help a lot.

Benefits of higher entry processes limit:

• Helps in catering to large website traffic.
• Has the ability to run more scripts at one time.
• Makes the website faster, especially in case of an ecommerce website where there are many PHP scripts running for database queries.
• Prevents your website from getting suspended with high traffic spikes.
• Important for WordPress multi-site build or for running multiple web applications in one hosting account.

What Is Number Of Processes?

A typical shared server can only have 25 cPanel processes running at once. The majority of websites function flawlessly with a restriction of 25 concurrent processes. The website’s operations come and go so fast that they virtually ever overlap. IMAP, SSH connections, and other processes that are running under the same account are examples of these concurrent processes.
These processes are same as the entry processes; the only difference is that these processes include all the processes generated by the account or website apart from the specific page, SSH or cron jobs. If the number of processes has been crossed, error 500 or error 503 will be displayed when the website is accessed.
It is beneficial if you have many concurrent users connected to the same server at a given point of time for executing various processes like for examples for accessing emails through IMAP, FTP etc.

Conclusion:
You will have a better understanding of the crucial features—apart from the obvious ones—that you should search for in an affordable web hosting bundle thanks to the information stated above. Before you fall for unlimited storage and bandwidth, be sure you understand these crucial technological aspects. There is no need in choosing such a web hosting package if you are offered infinite space but in practice your website is getting limited.