Hey guys, I am wondering how hosting companies fit hundreds or thousands of people on shared hosting. How does this work? Are they all Different IP's or separate? What programs/software do they use?
Not necessarily. Thousands of low impact sites could conceivably fit on one server. It depends on what kind of usage you are seeing from all the sites individually and collectively that determines the amount you can put on one server. The things that factor into this are server cpu/ram, hard drive space and of course bandwidth. You can have the most powerful server in the world, but without adequate bandwidth, you are still limited in what you can offer in terms of volume. Most shared providers like ourselves tend to employ several multi-core, multiprocessor servers and utilize proper bandwidth management solutions and packages to limit space, resources utilized and bandwidth so that no one site is able to cause problems for everyone. That said, as some sites do begin to grow to a level that may be unacceptable, we typically suggest they move to a dedicated server of their own. The larger bargain basement facilities will typically group problem sites on the same shit servers so that abusive customers can fight for resources with each other, that or leave. Its fairly easy for a provider to balance the good with the bad. Many of us simply do not want image hosting, or proxy based sites, unless they get their own server because they typically tend to abuse the shared environment. Shared hosting is ideally suited for SOHO, blogs, small to medium business and most small forums and content based web sites.