Mines usually at 1 and below on a shared hosting account. I wouldn't worry too much though, as the server loads are for the entire server, so if you see the loads go high, then it will probably be down to another client on the same server.

Regards Jason :)

I use Jaguar PC, mine are always below 2 and usually barely above 1 or just below it.

For those interested my forum is at present closed and i run nothing else on this hostgator shared hosting account, my server load for 2cpu's is reading 6.12 and flashing a red dot.

I would like to thank all for replying to this thread as I thought it was me causing that load, it has been higher, now I know it obviously isn't. I have been advised to go with Surpass and get rid of hostgator, who I came to from 1 and 1 (wouldn't touch them again)

A very happy Tinkerbell :D

Update - server load is at 74.62 for 2 cpu's with hostgator's shared hosting, time to find someone else i think!!!

Well, no matter how big they are - just look at there pricing and packages.. Highly over-selling, along with highly over-loading the servers.

When you pay for shared hosting the risk of the host overselling the server's resources is probable. I have 3 dedicated servers from three different hosts. They all run great, but at a slightly higher price than average. I would stay away from VPS as most are oversold. Also some control panels take up a good amount of resources. I like direct admin. There are not as many features compared to some other control panels, but direct admin is simple, secure, and fast. I try to keep my servers below 50% load on both memory and cpu. Memory is also very important. All my servers have at least 2GB. The more the better. To top it off, I make sure all clients on the servers are not running scripts that are not allowed or clients that are abusing the server. Although I don't host with either of the hosts mentioned on this thread, 1and1 is a great choice based on past experience.

Here's mine right now, and mine some time ago:

Now:Server Load Averages 6.12 4.12 5.23 | 1 Users Online (1 members and 0 guests)
Earlier: 72.37 55.40 29.45 | 3 Users Online (1 members and 2 guests)

Server Load Averages 1.70 1.47 1.20 | 141 Users Online (105 members and 36 guests)

1 CPU

Usually bounces between .3 - .8, when it gets busy, goes up to 1-3, goes to 5-6 with the nightly backup...

snun: a load avg of 72 means something is wrong, my box only does that when I'm getting a syn attack...

I *think* the general rule is that the load should be less than the number of processors. Anything upto twice the cpu count is not good, but not bad, anything over that is just not good - the server is being pushed too much.

So if you have 2 cpus then <2 is good, 2 to 4 is ok, 4+ is not good.

So 10+ is bad no matter how you look at it (even if you have 4 cpu's).

Our server was hitting 2+ (twin proc) pretty much constantly and it failed last week. I don't know if it was directly the cause but thankfully our new box has halved it.
100-200 online average
1.16 1.13 0.90
now \0/.

So has anyone seen a server with 35CPUs?