Have you ever wondered which is the real difference among different offerings besides the fact that your applications run on a shared server? In fact, most of the times, this seems to be a tricky question because most service providers describe the boundaries and limits of their services based on the following common parameters:
- The resource type and quota: storage, bandwidth, mail boxes, mail lists, FTP accounts, database instances, etc.
- The underlying platform: Windows (IIS/Apache) or Linux (Apache) under whichever version.

Recently I've come across to a weird incident where a very network-demanding application started to show strange behaviors and poor performance. This application consumes lots of sockets, both on the client and the server. Of course, this shouldn't be an issue, as long as there are lots of solutions out there that have similar requirements.