Maximum WHM/cPanel accounts per server

[Aaron Hatton]

Hello,

Has anyone worked out as to how many accounts you can get on a WHM/cPanel hosting server? Does anyone have any calculations they use to work this out? I am concerned as to our servers hitting maximum capacity and would like to know a recommended threshold before purchasing more...

With Thanks

Aaron

 

[mageshm]

@ Aaron,
Its difficult to give exact details but I can share based on my experience in webhosting servers.
1) Its purely depends on your server type, like (Dedicated or VPS) and VPS technologies (such as xen, openvz, etc..)
2) Also its depends on your server hardware resources, like (Processor, RAM, HDD & motherboard). If you are using server processor such as (Intel Xeon) which will give better performance compare with desktop processor, like (i3, i5 & i7) because some of the providers offering like that.
3) RAM, HDD & Motherboard should be for server environment not for desktop environment.

Can you share your server configuration to move forward..)

 

[Aaron Hatton]

@ Aaron,
Its difficult to give exact details but I can share based on my experience in webhosting servers.
1) Its purely depends on your server type, like (Dedicated or VPS) and VPS technologies (such as xen, openvz, etc..)
2) Also its depends on your server hardware resources, like (Processor, RAM, HDD & motherboard). If you are using server processor such as (Intel Xeon) which will give better performance compare with desktop processor, like (i3, i5 & i7) because some of the providers offering like that.
3) RAM, HDD & Motherboard should be for server environment not for desktop environment.

Can you share your server configuration to move forward..)

I was hoping more for a formula to work it out myself in honesty but regardless... We use Virtual Machines on enterprise grade servers, specs are as follows:

Processor: Xeon E5-2670 v2
vCPU: 4
RAM: 15GB
Storage: 80GB SSD, 5TB SATA

Your feedback would be appreciated.

 

[anton_latvia]

It also depends a lot on how active each account is, what kind of scripts are hosted and how PHP/Apache is configured.
CPU is good enough, RAM - plenty. I would say that disk space is a bit too little for hosting large projects.. In general weak point is number of CPU cores (just 4) - under high usage or under attack (e.g. wordpress login script abuse) - load will come high.. On the other hand it does not matter how many accounts you have on a server..

You can host 1000 accounts or just 10. There is no special formula for this. Host as much as you disk space allow and look after abusers..

 

[Aaron Hatton]

It also depends a lot on how active each account is, what kind of scripts are hosted and how PHP/Apache is configured.
CPU is good enough, RAM - plenty. I would say that disk space is a bit too little for hosting large projects.. In general weak point is number of CPU cores (just 4) - under high usage or under attack (e.g. wordpress login script abuse) - load will come high.. On the other hand it does not matter how many accounts you have on a server..

You can host 1000 accounts or just 10. There is no special formula for this. Host as much as you disk space allow and look after abusers..

Thanks for the reply, we are using CloudLinux which I am hoping will prevent over usage of the CPU Cores (Unless all of our WordPress sites get attacked...)

Interesting as to what your opinion about the storage capacity...

 

[anton_latvia]

CloudLinux is good in terms of balancing resource allocation, but at some level it will come to certain limit and that moment does not depend on the number of site, rather on actual usage.
80gb. say you give 1gb per account. that is less than 80 accounts per server. simple math. of course, people might not use 1gb and here all the formulas stop.

 

[Aaron Hatton]

CloudLinux is good in terms of balancing resource allocation, but at some level it will come to certain limit and that moment does not depend on the number of site, rather on actual usage.
80gb. say you give 1gb per account. that is less than 80 accounts per server. simple math. of course, people might not use 1gb and here all the formulas stop.

I think you may have mis-understood, we use 80GB SSD for the OS and 5TB SATA for customer data...

 

[anton_latvia]

:D yeah.. thought you got 5tb of traffic.. well.. then I guess you would keep /home at 5tb partition and use ssd for databases, if possible. I would start with that at least. then you've got enough disk and enough memory. I think CPU usage would become first bottleneck. But still sorry to say - it's hard to say how many you can host. 50 active pages or 2000 of less active. You should monitor CPU usage (e.g. with munin plugin) and see how it would grow. when it would get over 50-60% in average - you would start feel it is becoming slow. Disk IO count and disk latency are also important parameters to watch.

 

[mageshm]

@Aaron Hatton,

As you said you are in VPS environment and I don't know about your technology. Based on your environment, you can host 500 to 800 accounts include CMS (wordpress, joomla, etc..) Also you have to look into visitor status on top-10 websites to conclude it. You are giving services to client and you need to make sure the server performance and stability to satisfy your customers.

Also keep in mind Anton commands too..)

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

As mentioned, there's no specific formula that will tell you how many accounts you can host because it's possible the individual accounts will use varying amounts of resources. That said, the previous responses and customer feedback should help provide you with a general answer to this question.

Thank you.