Is Your Web Hosting Provider Robbing You?

No, I am not joking. I recently found out how my web hosting provider was depriving me (unintentionally I hope) of significant revenue per month by making my site inaccessible to large number of users daily. And the way it was done took me by surprise.

Apache server has an interesting directive called MaxClients. MaxClients sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests that will be served. Any connection attempts over the MaxClients limit will normally be queued, up to a number based on the ListenBacklog directive. Once a child process is freed at the end of a different request, the connection will then be serviced.

For non-threaded servers, MaxClients translates into the maximum number of child processes that will be launched to serve requests. The default value is 256; to increase it, you must also raise ServerLimit.

Effectively it throttles your server during peak loads if set to too low a value. My Apache server served around 40GB last month. And yet for some un-Godly reason MaxClients was set to only 10! It meant whenever there was merely 10 simultaneous requests (which is much less than 10 users as each users makes multiple simultaneous requests to fetch images, javascript etc.) my server throttled.

I have taken their best (priciest offering) for VPS hosting. And yet…

I had seen such throttling as my blogs are becoming more popular but I never imagined they would have a hand in it. As soon as I mentioned to WestHost support they increased the MaxClients limit. And my problem was instantly solved. Now I am enjoying much higher level of traffic daily.