Prospective customer

[Pritzl]

We are thinking of moving our accounts over to SG. As part of the process, I have been reviewing the various intangibles like customer support etc.

While overall I am impressed, I must say that I am quite worried about the manner in which overloading is handled. I can understand the need to deal with the matter swiftly when it occurs, but:
I have not yet seen any published guidelines that would allow website admins to preguage the prospective load of their sites; and
the lack of a pre-emptive warning is quite worrying.
While the latter is a business decision (of arguable merit though it may be) I would have expected clearer guidelines regarding "acceptable" loads given the rather serious repercussions. Any clarification is appreciated.

[sgforumadmin]

Hello,

When our administrators monitor the servers, they watch out for many signals and the way these signals correspond to each other. The most important of those (but not limited to them) are probably the consumed CPU percentage per account, the number of processes running together and the time frame during which high resource consumption continues. There are certain "normal" limits of the CPU and the number of processes running simultaneously. Once in a while there are "peaks" in the CPU consumption or in the number of processes running simultaneously. Such peaks are called "loading". They may continue for a very short period of time, a few seconds usually. Or, for a longer time, when the server starts slowing down and there is an overload situation.

If a short loading is caused by 1 account, the admins start monitoring that specific account. If that account causes another loading, the owner gets an email warning to take measures and optimize the account.

If such a peak in resource consumption is caused for a longer period of time by one account, that account is suspended and the case is investigated by the admins to see if that account could stay on a shared server.

You may also visit another thread that discusses our policy regarding the load here (http://forum.siteground.com/showthread.php?t=477&highlight=load).

I don't know what is your specific case and why you are worried about loading, so you may want to come to our live chat and have our representatives consult you. If you think your site is too large and you might eventually end up in such a situation, I would like to clarify that having a large site does not necessarily mean that it will cause a server load. Server load is normally caused by not well optimized queries and badly written scripts and is more of an exception than a normal situation. Please feel free to PM me if you have any other specific questions.