How Much Traffic Can Shared Web Hosting Take?

Question

I have a cheap shared hosting plan with Reliablesite.net ($5/month).

I've been making a small site I want to start promoting in a few weeks and I was going to roadtest it by hosting it with the shared plan I already have.

My issue is that I don't know at what point I should move onto clustered hosting / dedicated hosting.

Questions

• What pageviews / day can a shared hosting plan be expected to handle?
• What can standard shared database servers take without choking up or me getting rude emails from my hosting provider?

Answer 1

Short answer: Dont worry about traffic. Untill no one will digg your site you're safe.

Answer 2

It would be best if you ask your provider these questions. Every provider is going to be different.

Generally what happens is that the provider can handle the requests, but they'll simply shut down your site once it reaches a certain threshold.

Answer 3

It also depends on the amount of bandwidth you have opted for. How much traffic are you expecting. My blog is in a shared hosting and and once 4k was my maximum in a day and I dint feel any difference in the performance. Dont worry unless your site appears in front page of digg or some high traffic websites link to you site.

Answer 4

Traffic usially is not a problem on shared hosting. The only problem you may encounter is RAM and CPU restrictions. But if your application written correctly it could operate well with these limitations.

Hints:

• user memory profiler to debug and optimize your web application
• use CDN for storing media files

If you need some numbers, a properly written web application which use CDN for storing media files could handle at least 10k unique visitors per day on a shared hosting.

Answer 5

In my experience, shared hosting environment like Reliablesite.com can take around 10-20 000 unique users per day, or 100-200 000 pageviews/day. That number can vary, depending on your site. For optimization, It is important to reduce number of db queries (i keep it max 6-7 per page render), and be careful when programming. Using ASP.NET MVC gave nice perf improvement for me, but good written webforms app can perform well also. If you are using some other tech stack, like PHP/MySQL, i don't know the numbers.
When you exceed those numbers, you will have enough money from google adsense to go with VPS or dedicated plan.

Just to add something regarding page render / db queries performance: using multiple resultset sproc or query is great way to reduce number of db requests!

Answer 6

I have been using mysql on shared hosting for a while mainly on informational websites that have gotten at most 300 visits per day. What I have found is that the hosting was barely sufficient to support more than 3 or 4 people on the website at one time without it almost crashing.

Theoretically i think shared hosting with most services could support about about 60 users per hour max efficiently if your users all came one or two at a time. This would equal out to about about 1500 users in one day. This is highly unlikely however because alot of users tend to be online at certain times of the day and you also have to throw in the fact that shared servers get sloppy alot due to abuse from others on the server.

I have heard from reliable sources that some vps hosting thats 40-50 dollars per month have supported 500,000 hits per month. I'm not sure what the websites configurations were though, i doubt the sites ran many dynamic db queries or possibly were simply static.

One other thing that is common on shared hosting is breaking up the file managers with the database hosting. Sometimes your files will do well appearing online but the database that runs your actual website will be lagging extremely due to abuse from your neighbors.

Answer 7

I suggest ensuring that your application is ready for large amounts of traffic, even if you are on a super duper webserver, but your app is badly written, you will loose potential clients. Some of the easiest optimizations that can be done to an existing web app is to reduce the number of DB connections, so read up on caching and partial caching.