Capital Hosting

If you are running mission-critical web applications then you understand how important it is to not only make sure your website is online but have it running smoothly. People have very little patience and short attention span when it comes to browsing online, if a website takes more than a few seconds to load, many people will just abandon the website.

A website's performance can be adversely affected if the server's hardware specification is below that required to run the website's applications or if the server is misconfigured.

Here's a few common mistakes to look out for:

Memory Shortage

If you have a top of the range processor but only a small amount of physical memory (RAM), it will create a performance bottleneck where the physical memory is too small for the amount of data the processor can handle, which will cause CPU load to spike as the processor tries to take on more data onto its onboard memory cache and the website will slow down or even crash. Anything below 4GB could be considered too small unless your website hosts only a few pages with your company's information and photos.

Slow Hard Drive

When people think about improving performance, the CPU and memory often come to mind first. However, a slow hard drive can also create a performance bottleneck that can bring the whole website to a halt. Hard drives come in different specifications. You have Flash drives which do not use conventional disk drives and can read and write at a speed that is multiple times faster than disk drives. You also have different types of disk drives that can read and write at 15k, 7k, 5k and 4k RPM. The higher the RPM, the faster the data can flow in and out of the system and the better the performance of the website.

If you are running a mission critical website, you should not go for anything below 7k RPM. You also need to bear in mind that hard drives degrade over time. Older hard drives are slower and more likely to fail. Some web hosting service providers do not provide accurate information on the hard drives they use so you need to be careful and look out for signs that could indicate low performance or aged hard drives. If the server has high performing CPU and memory and the web applications do not require a lot of resources yet you notice the server load is unusually high and volatile, there could be a problem with the hard drive, where any read/write operations can cause the CPU load to spike.

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