What Is Split-Shared Hosting?

by Rick on · Posted in Hosting · 0 Comments

Crucial's Split-Shared hosting was first introduced in October 2007, to take advantage of the resource isolation, scalability and performance enhancements that OS virtualization provides.

Split-Shared hosting is the concept of splitting shared hosting accounts into small, isolated groups of 5, 10, or 20 clients. Each client then shares the guaranteed resources of a virtual container or hosting environment with only 19, 9, or 4 other clients or neighbors.

Jump To Section

  1. Virtualization
  2. Client & Resource Isolation
  3. Dynamic Resource Allocation
  4. Split-Shared vs. Traditional Shared Hosting
  5. Uptime & Availability

Virtualization

A true Enterprise Class Internet Server is split into 10 virtual containers using Parallels Virtuozzo OS Virtualization software. Crucial is proud to be a Silver Level Service Provider of Parallels and specialize in delivering virtualized web hosting solutions.

Each individual container shares the speed, redundancy and other benefits of the high power server environment available from the underlying hardware.

  • Dual Processor, Quad Core Intel Xeon Nehalem 2.93 GHz
  • 36 GB fully buffered DDR-3 RAM
  • Seagate? Cheetah 15K.5 hard drives
  • RAID 1+0 disk array
  • 1000 Mbps port uplink

Resource & Client Isolation

Each container is assigned a guaranteed share of resources such as CPU, RAM and Disk space. These guaranteed resources are always available to the container and can not be used by other containers providing complete resource isolation between virtual container hosting environments.

Each container is provisioned with enough system resources to comfortably accommodate 5, 10, or 20 Split-Shared hosting clients. Limiting the total number of clients per container enhances each client's security and the overall quality of service for each Split-Shared hosting account. 

With only 19, 9, or 4 other clients sharing resources the chances for resource abuse and exploitation by a shared hosting "neighbor" are greatly reduced compared to traditional shared hosting models which could share resources between 500, 1000 or more accounts in a single shared hosting environment.

Dynamic Resource Allocation

Parallels virtualization technology allows a container to dynamically scale a hosting environment's resources including CPU, RAM and disk space "on the fly" without the need for any downtime.

This ability to dynamically scale the resources of a container, or hosting environment, provides a unique and substantial advantage over other shared hosting models.

Split-Shared hosting environments are given more CPU and RAM on the fly to accommodate increases of Internet traffic and resource usage. A Split-Shared hosting environment can double, even triple, its RAM and CPU availability to cope with an unexpected flood of traffic.

Split-Shared vs. Traditional Shared Hosting

Traditional shared hosting clients share the resources of the entire dedicated server with all the other clients on the server. When the server's available resources have been exceeded the server, and all its clients, must be taken offline to add more resources possibly taking hours of time.

The result is that with traditional shared hosting a very large number of clients must all share and compete with other clients for their fair share of the available server resources and services such as MySQL, PHP and Apache.

A minimum of 500 clients competing for services and resources would not be uncommon with traditional shared hosting models. With up to thousands of clients all sharing the same MySQL server, PHP/Apache and other resources such as mail delivery, log processing and backup procedures, etc. it's easy to understand how a traditional web host can quickly get bogged down and lose its quality of service as more & more clients are added to the server.

Crucial's Split-Shared hosting reduces the competition for resources by limiting the number of clients in a shared hosting environment to only 20, 10, or 5 individual accounts; 20 to 100 times fewer clients competing for shared resources results in a greatly improved hosting experience.

Uptime & Availability

Using Parallels Virtualization technology, Crucial has the ability to migrate a hosting environment from one server to another without interrupting any services. This ability to perform live migrations and the ability to effectively control resource usage provides the foundation for a very stable hosting environment.

The primary cause of most downtime for shared hosting is the overuse of system resources. This is typically due to a hosting environment having too many accounts or perhaps a single account consuming a majority of the system resources.

By limiting the number of clients per hosting environment and assuring the environment has plenty of resources this sort of outage can be easily avoided.  The ability of a hosting environment to dynamically scale its resources and have more CPU and RAM available when necessary further enhances the stability of Crucial's Split-Shared hosting.

When faced with the decision to share resources with 4-19 other clients or 500 other clients, Split-Shared hosting wins on all levels.

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