Can anyone tell me what CPU usage is ? I read the terms of a hosting company and they said that you will be penalised for going over the CPU usage, what does this mean and how will i know i I have gone over or not ?

Emma Louise

CPU stands for Central Processing Unit which is the processor of the server your website would be hosted on at the hosting company.

Can you post a link to the company or give more details of what the terms actually say?

As a guess i imagine they only allow your website to consume a certain amount of processor time on their servers. Which basically means if its a busy and complicated site you might get penalised.

I'd check back with them what exactly they mean, also you'd need to know what your limits are and how you find out when you've reached them. Again, quesitons you'd need to ask the host.

Thanks for the reply, the site is velcom.com, there hosting prices are no where near as cheap as my last reseller account but I have been using them for 2 years for a smaller project and the service was spot on, Id rather pay a little more and know I will get a good service :-) My bandwidth will be 175 GB per month, how many visitors roughly will this allow me ?????

All hosts selling shared hosting (or reseller hosting for that matter) will have a "resources abuse" policy in the TOS. Since all the websites on a server share the CPU and the internal memory, the host cannot permit for any one of them too use to much of either. Usually the hosts are lenient and a website can use a lot of the CPU power, but should that usage get to such high levels that it causes a drop in server performance and thus affect the other websites, the host will shut it down.

BTW, by looking at their pricing I would say this host is really cheap actually. Usually the cheaper the host, the more websites on a server and the lower the CPU threashold that the host will consider "abuse".

My bandwidth will be 175 GB per month, how many visitors roughly will this allow me ?????

Usually this is impossible to predict as there are many factors to count in. If you describe your website a bit we might be able to give a very rough guestimate. It basically comes down to how much bandwidth will be "consumed" by your average visitor.

Thanks for the reply, My site will be a business directory for Ireland, Mainly text based, each page is approx 25kb, There will be approx 100 pages, to start anyway....

as long as you're not serving big videos and other large files then 175GB/month is PLENTY. You say you're serving mainly text so I'd say you have more than enough.

You'd be hard pressed to exceed your limit, even with spikes in traffic so longas your content remains orimarily text and average number of graphics.