Blog
Hosting

Understanding Your Hosting Plan: What Units and Slots Mean

We measure capacity in units, not vague percentages. Here's how to read your plan limits, what happens when you approach them, and why we publish server capacity publicly.

Most shared hosting plans are described in vague terms: "unlimited bandwidth", "generous resources", "optimised for performance". These descriptions say nothing concrete about what you actually get.

Our plans are described differently. Here's what the terminology means.

Units and Slots

Each physical server has a capacity measured in units. A unit is our internal measure of resource weight — CPU, RAM, and I/O combined.

Each plan type consumes a fixed number of units:

| Plan | Units | Best for | |---|---|---| | Flameling | 1 | Personal sites, portfolios, small blogs | | Ember | 10 | Business sites, active blogs, WooCommerce | | Blaze | 25 | High-traffic sites, multiple domains | | Inferno | 50 | High-resource applications |

A server has 100 units total. When all 100 are allocated, the server is full and no more signups are accepted.

This is what "no overselling" means concretely: the total units sold never exceeds 100 per server.

What Each Plan Includes

Plan limits are enforced at the kernel level (cgroups). Your plan page in the customer portal shows your exact limits:

Disk and bandwidth are hard quotas. PHP memory and workers are enforced per-request and per-process by cgroups.

What "Unlimited" Actually Means

We don't advertise "unlimited" anything, because nothing on a physical server is unlimited. When you see "unlimited bandwidth" from a competitor, read the terms of service carefully — you'll typically find fair use clauses, throttling above undisclosed thresholds, or restrictions on certain content types.

Our numbers are real and they're the same in our panel, our terms, and our technical configuration. There's no undisclosed throttle.

What Happens When You Approach Your Limits

Disk: You receive an email notification at 80% usage and again at 90%. At 100%, writes fail — your site may error on uploads or database writes. The fix is to either clean up old files or upgrade your plan.

PHP memory: If a PHP request tries to use more memory than your limit, PHP kills that request. You see a 500 error for that specific request. Other requests are unaffected. This is the correct behaviour — your site degrades gracefully rather than consuming memory that belongs to other accounts.

PHP workers: If all workers are busy when a new request arrives, it waits in queue. If the queue fills, the request gets a 503. This typically indicates you need more workers (higher plan) or that a PHP process is hanging.

Live Capacity

We publish server capacity in real time on our homepage. Every server, every plan type, updated every 60 seconds. You can see exactly how full the server your site runs on is, right now.

We're not aware of any other host that publishes this. We do it because we think you should be able to verify our capacity claims independently.

Ready for hosting that doesn't oversell?

Get started from £10/mo More articles
Stay in the loop New posts, platform updates, and open chat — join the community.
Join Discord