How many web sites can you host on a server?

Can we host unlimited websites on a server? This is one question in hosting industry that does not has a definitive answer. Some hosting providers push it to the limits and continue to add websites on a server till they see indicators of slow performance while others play safe with trusted number of resources and their prior experience. This article does not provide you with an accurate number of sites that you can host on a server but will highlight the factors that dramatically affect the performance of your server and also help you move in the right direction.

» Hardware – The single most and prime factor behind your server’s performance is the underlying hardware that it has. The main components that directly affect its performance are CPU (the processors), Bus, RAM and Hard Disk. The more powerful the hardware the better is the performance of the server. The hard disk has an important role to play on a server that has many websites requiring frequent read/write access to their data. If you consider moving the database to a different but powerful hardware, it will dramatically bring down the load on the server serving just the static pages and front end.

» Type of Websites – The second important factor is the type of websites that a server hosts. If you host 1000 websites that has as few as 10 static html pages, your server may not require lot of hardware resources but a single blog site that receives 50,000 unique page hits a day may limit the number of sites you can host on that same server. So, if you plan to put as many sites as possible on a single server, consider the type of websites that you will host on that server and you will then be able to arrive at a descent number of sites that will not affect the performance of the server.

» Other factors - Some other factors to consider are, if you plan to run most of the websites on a single IP or dedicated IPs, bandwidth that is available to the server vs. the actual bandwidth required by all of those websites combined, impact that one server will have on your customer support if it goes down and time that it might take to recover it.

Conclusion: You may keep adding any number of websites to a server provided you keep an eye on its performance and resource it may require in the long run. If you host a blog on a server that hardly receives any traffic during first few months but may later on become popular like crazy, then it may alone consume most of your server’s resources and directly affect the performance of other co-hosted websites. A recommend strategy would be that, in a shared hosting environment, you mix the type of websites on a server and see that 20% of resources are always free at any given point of time. Another approach would be to isolate a type of websites to a particular server, for example, all static and small websites on one server and blogs on a more powerful server.