DrakNet Raises All Shared Account Allotments
Today, we raised all account allotments for every shared account that we offer, all the way from the Intro Account on up to the standard shared hosting accounts. At the lower end of the spectrum, disk space was doubled (as well as each feature), and bandwidth was doubled and tripled in some cases.
“OMG! They’re selling out! They’ve gone to the dark side! They’re doing what they just hypocritically railed against! Those jerks!”
Well, not quite. And just to avoid that argument, we’ll explain exactly what’s going on!
Recently, we codified exactly how much CPU average and memory average and MySQL average you’re allowed to use per day (on… um, average). We kept detailed records of sites that used higher resource usage and came up with something that we thought was fair, then we stuck it into the TOS,. That left us free to look at the allotments that we have, what resources are being used, and whether we were offering too little considering the server specs that we have.
The machines we have are a little under a year old, are all dual processor with dual cores, and are expandable up to 24 Gigs of memory (most run currently at 8 Gigs to 16 Gigs). When we bought ‘em, we got some hefty disks (with Raid) because we saw that ya’ll were using more and more disk space and wanted to be prepared. We’re well known at this point for being overly prepared and, frankly, we have lots of disk space sitting idle on all 4 servers.
Blastoid is using 63G with 111G free, Mudkip is using 81G with 93G free, Squirtle is using 69G with 106G free, and Warturtle is using 40G with 67G free (Poor War is a little smaller than his brothers). So, we host 253 Gigs of information in the home partition (where your sites go), and we have the ability right now to expand into 377 Gigs of free disk space on hand. In every case, the server has more space free than is being used.
Currently, we’re installing on squirtle, however, resource-wise ol’ Squirt’s a fairly busy server and we’re likely looking at our 5th box here within the next month or two. This begs the question as to what we do with all that disk space lying around, and so we decided to give it to you (because, well, that is what its there for).
When server’s begin to average their load at about 1.5 to 2, we stop installing new accounts on them, as all servers have resellers on them and we need to leave room to grow for them. (None of the servers currently are actually there, yet, but we’d rather leave a lot idle than start moving accounts.) We have a hard limit of 500 accounts per server because have a lot of extremely small allotments on some of the accounts, like the Intros, and they don’t have the ability to make all that much of a resource dent. (For the curious, there are 217 on Warturtle, 360 on Squirtle, 418 on Blastoid, and Mudkip’s got 434.)
Everything’s balanced really well, with lots left over, and that’s why we made the decision – not because we’re working up to a gazillion terabyte shared accounts. We felt upping these allotments was a safe bet, and recently we’ve seen more higher resource sites that are not having an adverse impact on the holy triad of shared hosting (cpu/mem/mysql), so we still feel comfortable with the fact that you can use the resource we’re allotting you outright without a problem, and they still give you a good indication of where you are in the “OMG my site is gonna get suspended” spectrum.
Let us know if you have any questions!
Tags: allotments
