Average Clients on One Server POLL.

It depends on:

Size of Clients
Free/Paid Accounts
Conection to the server
What services they have e.g. Java Chat server
What there hosting



I go by that when the server has a decent amount of people on and still has a low avearge load i call it full.

 

There is no real average, we have servers with only 17 accounts while others have 110. Generally because servers are not that expensive we put no more than 150 clients per server max.

 

I would never put more than 500 on a box. Your risk too much putting too many clients on a machine and servers are so cheap. I think our most maxed out box is 400 accounts.

 

400 is still quite alot, is it a powerfull server?

 

The accounts are all pretty tame, I dont have any of those high volume forum customers or people doing lots of database work. I know that even 50 accounts could kill a powerful machine if they were all doing mysql or memory/disk gobbling cgi apps.

 

We've got servers with 100 accounts on them and we've got servers with over 2000 on them. The "100 account" servers tend to be the heavier users and the 2000 account servers tend to just be "single flat HTML webpage" sites. It just depends on what sort of resources each account needs which will be the deciding factor (you could, in theory, have a server with 6000+ accounts without problems, but I've manage to overload a server with a single account).

 

These figures are all for a single server. The moment you have a server consisting of a cluster (of let's say 10 servers), the figures will be totally different. Clusters could easily support 1000's + domains

 

Exactly..You should first decide what do you want to give with your hosting and then one can decide the number of domains.

Having more account per server includes a higher the risk. incase of a hardware failure, hack attempt etc..

 

We have one box with 2 domains...They are a high resource site and do over 1 million in online sales a year. As others have noted, it depends on the sites and how much resources they use. However. I would never place more than 150-200 sites on a shared server.