What Server Load with DASP?

What Server Load with DASP? Load balancing done?

An existing and so far happy customer here. I may be writing an app that will generate a lot of traffic to my website. I will gladly pay for any excess bandwidth needed, but am wondering about two questions:

1) what server load limits does DiscountASP have for its customers? See below for a definition

2) Does DASP practice load balancing? I think I read somewhere it does. (not that important a question---#1 more important to me)


PJ2010


What is Server Load?

Load expresses how many processes are waiting in the queue to access the computer processor. This is calculated for a certain period of time, and the smaller the number the better.

We consider a load value under 10 to be acceptable.
Why is my server load high?

Shared and Reseller plans: We are already aware of the problem because we monitor your server closely. Likely another user is causing the high load, so we will suspend that person and restore the server to a normal load.

VPS and Dedicated servers: Possibly you have SQL connections that are not closing properly, or a broken script, or you are experiencing abnormally heavy traffic, or your server could be under attack.

Load balancing is a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service is usually provided by dedicated software or hardware, such as a multilayer switch or a Domain Name System server.

 

We do not. Not in the way that you're thinking, anyway. Our network is load balanced across multiple backbone connections, but individual servers are not. We do not run server clusters, and no clusters means no load balancing. Having worked for a company that did do web server clustering/load balancing, I can tell you that for the vast majority of users that kind of set up causes far more trouble than is justified by the very marginal performance benefit. It's not something the typical site needs or should use. That's just my opinion, of course, but it's based on painful first-hand experience.

I assume you cut the "What is Server Load?" bit from a *nix host somewhere? We don't measure server load the way they do on a unix or linux server. The limitations here are primarily memory use, and that is controlled, in our case, by using isolated application pools. If your memory use consistently exceeds what's available for your account, you'll have problems with your application.

Excessive bandwidth use (over the account quota) does not cause any technical problems (we automatically provide the needed bandwidth), but if the overages are consistent the billing department will contact you to purchase additional bandwidth.

To answer your next question, we can't estimate how much memory or bandwidth your site will use. Every application is different.