In a perfect world, your web hosting company might assume that every website consumes the same processing power, but this is not the case. Busy websites with heavy codes can take up more compute cycles. Compute Cycle (CC) provides a better way to measure how busy a website is, apart from its bandwidth and storage. It’s fair to say that those with higher CC’s should be charged more.
“Compute Cycles are a measurement of the processing time that your applications require, attained by calculating CPU processing time and accounting for the disk I/O consumed by your application’s operations”
Our standard web hosting comes with 10,000 CC a month, more than enough for most websites. So far, we’ve only had two customers who’ve exceeded their CCs. Instead of charging them (or penalising them), we work hand in hand with them to look into their site and find out if we can reduce the high CC problem. Since both of them are running busy Blogs, we introduced the WP-Cache, a plugin that serves content from the cache for faster access and reduced CC.