Its important to understand the limitations and problems of Shared and Dedicated web hosting needs to be known for a better understanding of clustered web hosting.

A normal shared web hosting is popular in the world of web hosting as it is cheap and affordable. The web hosting companies distribute the clients of shared web hosting between different servers. For example a web hosting company has 500 customers. It distributes the customers in the following manner:

100 Customers on Server 1

100 Customers on Server 2

100 Customers on Server 3

100 Customers on Server 4

100 Customers on Server 5

This type of method has a lot of disadvantages, take for example if the server 1 goes down or has some functional problem i.e. it goes offline, then all the customers hosted on that server would get affected and will not be able to receive the service. Even the web hosting service provider cannot tell due to what the server crashed or is not functioning, there might be several reasons why the shared server goes down:

The other customer accounts use all the server resources because:

  • The users get hacked through an insecure script or site.
  • The uses receive some other major exposure or are naturally becoming very busy.

The servers usually suffer the following failures:

  • Disk failures
  • Many other components fail
  • Supply of Power fail

Maintenance of the Server

  • Upgradation of the server hardware or the preventive maintenance.
  • Upgradation of the firmware
  • Upgradation of the software

The account of the customer gets suspended in case of excessive CPU usage. The hosting companies use a tracking tool to check the usage, the account gets suspended before it affects the server negatively. Such suspension might prove to be fatal if there is a lot of traffic on the web-site. Under normal load the speed of the site depends on the activity on the other sites hosted on the same server. The hosting companies try to distribute the load evenly across the entire server. But the traffic on the websites is dynamic, so even after the load balancing the server might get overloaded. As the website gains popularity and the traffic increases the web hosting package should be upgraded from a shared hosting package to a virtual private server or a dedicated server package. Moving the web-site to a dedicated server or a virtual private server offers dedicated resources to the site.

In a clustered system multiple server are load balanced, hence the reliability increases. When the number of servers increase the overall load decreases. Load balancing allows all the resources to be available to all the customers. It helps to handle busy websites and unexpected traffic.