Compare I/O

Listed below is a comparison of how the 18 web hosts we review restrict or limit I/O.

When you purchase a shared hosting account you’re purchasing hosting on a server shared by potentially hundreds or thousands of other websites.

Many web hosts now use Cloud Linux OS to democratically assign server resource to each customer. Cloud Linux allows web hosts to create what are referred to as lightweight virtualized environments (LVEs) for each customer.

LVEs compartmentalize a web server and ensure that no single user can leverage a disproportionate amount of server resources, which is a problem that has long plagued web hosts.

I/O is input/output and refers to the speed at which data is transferred from, or to, your server’s hard drive (this is typically referred to as throughput). It differs from IOPS, which refers to a limit on the total number of read/write operations that a hard drive can perform per second.

If a particular LVE reaches an I/O threshold then Cloud Linux can work to throttle that LVEs processes. This may manifest in your website running slower than it would ordinarily.

The default I/O limit set by CloudLinux is 1,024Kb/s, which is what most web hosts apply. However, web hosts like GreenGeeks and Namecheap limit I/O at 4MB/s and 6.25 MB/s (of all the web hosts we’ve reviewed Namecheap and GreenGeeks set the most lenient restrictions on I/O).