A common challenge in running shared hosting servers is how to ensure everyone gets a fair portion of the shared resources, and prevent any one misbehaving or resource-intensive script from affecting the performance and stability of the server for everyone else. One of those shared resources is memory (or RAM).
A site needs memory, and the server needs to provision it, at the instant a visitor arrives at a website, and during every successive page load. Simple HTML websites need very little memory; complex sites, based on robust content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, can use quite a bit.
Where memory really gets eaten up fast though is during on-the-fly image resizing, a feature common to many content management systems, image gallery applications, and banner ad management software. Even if an image is only three or four megabytes on your hard drive, resizing it on a webserver can take ten times that much memory!
To manage shared memory and preserve service quality on the Modwest shared hosting system, we maintain generous resource limits, and today we have some new flexibility to announce.
When memory limits are exceeded, the page will fail to load, display a dreaded Internal Server Error and usually throw a line in your error log similar to:
If resizing images prior to upload is not an option, or if you're exceeding memory limits for reasons other than image resizing, there is a solution:
We can now increase memory limits on a site-by-site basis.
We're calling it a "Memory Boost". It's not advertised on our website yet, but it is available now.
Each Memory Boost makes an additional 32 Megabytes of memory available to your scripts running on the Modwest shared system. Up to two may be added to a site at $5/month each.
Memory Boost won't make a slow site run faster, but may come in handy for memory-hungry sites on our shared system that are bumping up against those service-quality resource limits from time to time.
Need a 'Boost? Just contact us.
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