Most website owner host their site within a remote server. Most of them are aware to the storage limitation and the traffic. However sometimes you cannot even reach these limits, just because you missed another figure that nobody bothered to tell you about.
Website hosting services are in a massive competition, and the prices are very low and sometimes even funny. But… most website owners are not really aware of a very importent element in website hosting.
You are paying for storage and the more the better, you are paying for traffic and again the more the better, after all you may have enough storage for thousands of video but not enough traffic to use it.
However there is another figure you dont know about… the amount of concurrent operations – that means the amount of operation your server can handle in a single second.
Every server has a limit to how many operation it can handle, and if it exceed the limit the result is either "server busy" or a complete collapse of the websit. For many website it means that they will never reach the traffic capability and their website will collapse a long before.
Why are we not told about it ? Because its easier for the hosting service to create a dependency and only when you reach this limit they tells you… sorry, it cost more money. Yes its cheating, especially when it comes to big sites that transfering them to a new service may take months.
How can we avoid it ?
First we have to know what an operation mean: a website with some text and 3 images means 4 operations, if 100 people try to reach it in the same time its 400 operation and so on…
The only way to avoid it is to optimize the website, not to use complicate image maps or un-needed pictures, sometimes a beautiful website is useless. Another solution which I am using is transfering a heavy graphics to a different server.
But the best way to avoid it is to ask your hosting services to tell you how many operations per second your site can handle and what does it mean exactly in terms of a basic standard page.