CPU Usage And Your Shared Hosting Account

Shared web hosting companies come up with all sorts of gimmicks to entice users into signing up.  Unlimited storage, unmetered bandwidth and all those huge numbers are basically just there to make you think you’re getting an immense amount of resources for so little money.  Truth is, those numbers are easily offset by quite a few things that are actually more crucial to consider when shopping for your web hosting, such as CPU utilization.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen shared hosting customers complain about their accounts being deactivated because of excessive CPU usage.  That’s because CPU usage, along with other resource limits, are usually buried somewhere in the Terms Of Service, while numbers like Bandwidth and Disk Space are bandied about in big, bold and colorful letters.

CPU usage, simply put, is the amount of processing power that your site uses up at any given time.  For the most part, your actual usage will depend on how many users are accessing your site, what kind of operations they’re doing and how your scripts are handling those requests.  Since you’re sharing your box with a few hundred (or a few thousand) other sites, taking up too much of the CPU will take away from other sites’ ability to use the same resource.  That will be true whether you’re using a Linux or a Windows web hosting.

If you’re running WordPress, for instance, with 20 plugins installed and 5,000 users access your site at the same time, you’ll likely be taxing the CPU for an extended period.  Should your usage exceed the limits set by the web host, they’ll likely turn off your account and politely ask you to upgrade to a different hosting plan, even if your actual bandwidth and storage utilization are well below what you’ve been promised.