Linux-for-hosting operating system developer CloudLinux has issued a white paper detailing the findings of a study the company conducted aimed at learning more about how to balance server load in situations faced by shared hosting firms, offering insight into the issues faced and potential solutions to help providers tackle them.

“Based on my many years of experience in the hosting arena, I am thrilled to show how CloudLinux LVE technology closes the market gap that exists in the web hosting environment by outperforming the standard OS. As our white paper outlines, it is now possible to achieve a balanced, stable server environment along with improving density of shared hosting servers through a well-supported Linux version specifically optimized for web hosters.” – Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO

Dubbed “How to Squeeze More Efficiency Out of Your Infrastructure,” the paper spends a short time focusing on the problem itself with the bulk of the words being dedicated to the solutions that can be found by using CloudLinux operating systems, offering features found in the company’s Linux distributions that can lower server load while actually increasing density.

The study itself was carried out by technicians who analyzed server log activity and the corresponding experiences of hosting providers, identifying particular inefficencies in infrastructure and making appropriate recommendations. When the numbers were crunched, CloudLinux found that 46.6 percent of web hosts studied reported at least some downtime at least a few times per month due to the load experienced by a single site. The totals suggest that the top one percent of sites is responsible for 39 percent of static requests; the top five percent of sites accounted for 65 percent of static requests.

The paper was also quick to point out that, while obvious server spikes due to increased traffic are to be expected, there are many common reasons for less-than-perfect hardware functioning, most of them related to badly executed and configured scripts and software on a machine. With the LightWeight Virtual Environment technology offered by the company, CloudLinux says that it can solve these issues by enabling web hosting providers to place limits on CPU usage for individual customers, preventing a single site from dictating the performance of an entire server worth of data.