Which limits do customers most commonly hit?

[dvduval]

This is just a question of curiosity, and I'm sure you guys would know. What would you say the limits customers hit most often in shared hosting?
1. Inodes
2. CPU cycles
3. Storage Space
4. Badwidth
5. Database connections

I know often people look first at bandwidth and storage when they are considering a host, but I'm under the impression there are other limits that are more commonly hit. Am I correct in this notion?

(Feel free to move this to the appropriate forum if pre-sales was not the best pick, but would love to get the answer on this one)

Thanks!

[gwyneth]

Because shared hosting accounts don't have limits for bandwidth or storage space, items 3 and 4 on your list are moot.

Of course, you could add others (percentage of server CPU; number of processes; email limits; etc)--see the Terms of Service.

[dvduval]

So no stats on the limits that are most commonly reached?
(no problem if not, but that is what I was hoping to get with my question)
Thanks

[whatrevolution]

I must hazard the guess at CPU cycles, because that one can be touched by many conditions, and doesn't always require an upgrade of the service plan, so it can be hit multiple times. Dvduval asked about shared hosting in general.

My estimate:

. CPU cycles
. Processes
. Database connections
. Mailboxes
. Inodes
. Storage Space
. Badwidth [sic] [lol]

Stats? None yet from me. HG might not tell you here... but they surprise me sometimes.

[EarlyOut]

It really depends on the kind of customer. One answer isn't going to apply to them all, or even to the bulk of them, I suspect. For example, email hoarders tend to run into inode problems before anything else, but POP3 email users who don't keep the server copies rarely do.

[GatorDaveC]

What I've seen the most lately is CPU usage abuse. A high percent is from people with probably 100+ word press blogs, along with a couple of plugins which probably weren't coded to be very efficient.

Its a mixture of index.php and wp-cron.php causing the problems. Index.php serves the pages, and then there are 20+ processes sitting there from wp-cron.php from client crawling hundreds, sometimes thousands of sites.

I also forgot to mention each of those processes spawn SQL processes.

So there you have it, its mostly CPU usage abuse, mixed with SQL abuse. Both kind of fall under the same category I'd say.

[dvduval]

Awesome, thanks everyone for your answers. That helps me a lot.
(I've got 3 reseller accounts, and happy with everything. go hostgator!)