Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : How many per server

Hello,
How many would you fit approx on your dedicated cPanel server? Just an average wanting to know how many others fit and if they oversell or not. Are you gaining a profit of $xx or $xxx per server/mo?
Average specs of Dual Xeon Processors (4 cores), 100GB diskspace, 1TB bandwidth and 6GB ram.
Thanks.
Regards.

[JFSG]

It always depend on your hosting plan.. There is no obvious way to tell if a host is overselling, unless you test them out..

[huckyboy]

you could try to 'scout' some of them by using myipneighbors.com
just type in a domain that you know (or assumed) is hosted on a shared server and you'll see approx. how many accounts are there in the box, using the same IP.
some have more than 100 accounts, others have more.

[SSHocker]

It will depend on what type of site.
5 accounts could cripple a server if they were very busy forums.
5000 static html sites could cruise on the same server.
A few hundred typical accounts should be ok on a server with those specs
The CPU and memory usage will guide you

Watch the CPU and memory. We often have to move high volume sites off of a server to a less populated server. We could easily host a few thousand static sites on the above spec server but combine that with a forum like WHT it would cripple.

[felit0]

What SSHocker & HawkFX said... there's no magic number, you need to manage the server's load. It could potentially host 1000 simple html sites, or less than 100 sites if they are busy sites running php/mysql scripts, etc...

[GixxerPC]

As others said, just watch your server load.

[Patrick]

As others said, just watch your server load.
It's not just the server load, there's also disk IO that plays a very important role in a servers performance. Having a decent load average is great and all, but if there's a bottle neck with the disk IO then everything is going to come to a crawl.

[Tina J]

you could try to 'scout' some of them by using myipneighbors.com
just type in a domain that you know (or assumed) is hosted on a shared server and you'll see approx. how many accounts are there in the box, using the same IP.
some have more than 100 accounts, others have more.
That is a completely and totally inaccurate tool. Doesn't even come close to being correct on several of our servers.
--Tina

[01globalnet]

That is a completely and totally inaccurate tool. Doesn't even come close to being correct on several of our servers.
--Tina
Right, I frequently get different results. Also, those tools work with just one shared ip - there are cases that rsellers have different ip for their clients, so these tools are way off from being accurate.
But this has nothing to do with the op haha!

[01globalnet]

Hello,
How many would you fit approx on your dedicated cPanel server? Just an average wanting to know how many others fit and if they oversell or not. Are you gaining a profit of $xx or $xxx per server/mo?
Average specs of Dual Xeon Processors (4 cores), 100GB diskspace, 1TB bandwidth and 6GB ram.
Thanks.
Regards.
I would target not to fill more than 50gb on this server and have around 100 websites with plans like 500mb // ~15gb bandwidth for 10$ each plan. That would lead to 1000$ per server. If the server costs were about $600 (lease, backups, support, management etc.), then a 400$ (at least) profit would be great for me! But that's just me!

Thanks, but at $10 for 500mb/15GB bandwidth is a little short.
Anyway,
Thanks all.

[HostingBig]

That is a completely and totally inaccurate tool. Doesn't even come close to being correct on several of our servers.
Dito

[Orien]

100s to 1000s of accounts could fit on a server depending on average resource usage.

[MH-Nick]

I know a server that runs 3500+ accounts (no PHP or MySQL functionality), in a high spec virtualised server. The only occasional problem was outgoing spammers.