Did you know that most individual hosting accounts are limited to fifty concurrent connections? I didn’t. All these years of building hundreds of websites and running dozens and dozens of servers; well, that’s why I didn’t know it – I usually use dedicated servers for my websites.
Except my personal blog here – I have this one site on an individual hosting account so just in case everything blows up customers can still get a hold of me. But all this time my blog has been limited to fifty concurrent connections (let’s say 40 normal people a couple search engines and some spam bots).
So that might explain why my traffic to this site has been pretty steady for two years – no major peaks or valleys. Because when too many people tried to access this site, it would just freeze.
So how did I find this out? I’m getting ready to get all my networks launched again and was talking to a VERY well known host about maybe having all sites on individual hosting instead of dedicated servers. Seemed like a good idea just because my blog ranks well, so why not do that with all my sites? Sure it’s a pain to update, but I thought it sounded fun. And I’m a little nutty like that sometimes.
That’s when tech support told me, “You do realize individual hosting accounts are limited to 50 connections?” I was like, “WHAT?”. From what I can tell this seems to be standard with all the hosting companies. So the cheap plans you see that include “unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth” might be true for the most part; it’s just that it’s unlimited bandwidth per what the 50 connections can gobble up.
So back to the drawing board. If you have a lot of websites, it only makes sense to go with dedicated servers (or virtual private servers if you like that) so you can throttle the connections across your network; moving high traffic sites to new servers if needed.
But now it’s not fun again, so I need to rethink it. If it’s not fun then I get bored quickly. And yes, even hosting has to be fun. Maybe take all my content areas to subdomains and have a dedicated server optimized for each type of content….Mmmm…now THAT sounds fun.