At the end of the last year we wrote about our new process of setting you up on an unmetered shared or private server. Before then it always took us a few days to get you completely set up, but now it typically takes one business day or – in cases where you’d like an unmetered account on a shared server that has open spots – a couple of minutes.
In this post we’d like to address the limitations of these different servers and the differences in use compared to our regular plans.
Limitations
First of all let’s make it clear that both the unmetered shared server account as well as the private server account allow for as many conversions as the server can handle. In the case of the private server you are free to use that capacity however you like and you have 8 cores and virtually unlimited bandwidth at your disposal. You can also ask for multiple private servers with a load balancer if you run an insane amount of conversions, but that’s a different topic.
For the unmetered shared account there are two important limitations. These are basically the same limitations that apply to all our plans i.e.:
- You can only access the server for one conversion at a time. If we’re still processing a conversion for you, you can not request another conversion to start at the same time. We actually prevent you from doing so, by blocking additional incoming connections from the same account during the conversion process.
By doing this we always have enough capacity on our servers to serve the customers that share the server with you. - Each conversion can take a maximum of 60 seconds to complete. Again, this is to protect other customers against resource hogging on the servers.
Differences in usage compared to regular services
All functionality that’s available in our regular services (such as the HTML to PDF API and SDK) is available to you when you sign up for an unmetered or private server account. So you’ll get access to all of these (as opposed to a singular service). You can choose whichever you want to use.
Other than that you’ll have to call the API and SDK a little different. This is because we’ll give you a different subdomain to use.This is because you can only use the specific server that we reserved for you and not the other general servers.
For the API this means you will not be calling europe.htm2pdf.co.uk/urltopdf?apikey=…. but sharedX.htm2pdf.co.uk/urltopdf?apikey=….
For the SDK you will be setting the subdomain by calling $pdf->SetServer(‘sharedX’); if sharedX is the subdomain that we assign to you.
I hope it helps you understand how easy the whole process is and what you need to do to get up and running. If your company wants to outsource the HTML to PDF creation process and wants to be sure it’s done professionally – then get in touch or sign up!