Maximum visitors shared hosting can handle ~ When to go with Dedicated
- Saturday, September 12, 2009, 10:50
- Featured, Hosting News
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Loading ...You have made a website and are ready to promote it big way and you have few visitors coming in from here and there. Now if your promotion endeavors hit the right chord, you might be expecting a whole pool of visitors. when I started my site the main problem that i was facing was how to get visitors to my site? now things have changed and so do problems now the question that haunts me( and maybe you ) is:
How much visitors can my shared hosting handle?
The answer is not a simple mathematical number. It depends upon the type of your content ( php, static, mySQL ) and also the limit set by hosting provider. Some people think that shared hosting means that you have access to all server resources and can use all resources as desired. Lets remove this misconception first. How shared hosting operates is that hosting provider places several websites on single physical server with single(mostly) IP address. All resources including price is shared amongst accounts, it is the responsibility of hosting provider to ensure that each account is allocated resources well within its limit and that others are not affected by misuse by any one account
Lets understand impact one by one based on contents:
Static page( like index.html)
The overhead on hosting provider would be no of simultaneous connections, each visitor requesting static page( like index.html) would be one connection, but remember once page has been downloaded by visitor the connection is terminated. A new connection is created when the visitor clicks somewhere within that page to load additional data.
~ Check with your hosting provider maximum simultaneous connection allowed should be > 500.
Dynamic pages ( like ASP, php)
These are server side scripts that require RAM and CPU of the server on which your site is hosted so a hosting provider is really concerned of this, but if you are paying $5 for your account, the provider won’t let you use the entire resources meant for 100+ accounts on same physical server. The measure for maximum dynamical pages allowed is dynamic connection session. Generally a dynamic page session is counted as time in which a dynamic page is fully created.
~ Check for max php/asp session must be > 50
~ Max CPU usage limit.
~ Max database(mySQL etc) queries.
What will happen if my website get more visitors than it can handle
When choosing a shared web hosting plan, most people only consider the amount of bandwidth and space that a website will need. However, as time goes on and your website gets more popular, it is common to get the dreaded CPU limit exceeded warning from your web host. After the warning your website sometimes ends up suspended/removed from the server. If there is an excessive load on server it might also throw HTTP 500 error to visitors
Things that can be done to enhance performance of shared hosting
- Use static pages and load your images, media etc on servers like Flickr, Youtube
- Use performance enhancing caching for dynamic pages
- Make optimized applications
What if my site is more popular than you think?
There you go, if your site is that much important to you then it must definitely deserve more than a $5 account. Go for a VPS or Dedicated Account
A virtual private server(VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple virtual servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted. You will get dedicated resources like RAM, CPU, disk space exclusively for your website and shall not be shared by anyone else. VPS Servers have become more affordable now, you can get one for $15. Find more options here.
Check out difference between VPS and Dedicated.
Hope that i might have cleared a few doubts. Please leave your comment if you have some doubt left
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2 Comments on “Maximum visitors shared hosting can handle ~ When to go with Dedicated”
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If you site is making any sort of money then you should immediately switch to a VPS. You risk losing business and revenue by trying to save a few dollars on shared hosting. Do the right thing for your business and invest in it.
I had the same problem with one of my sites. It started getting popular and the traffic increased many folds but my shared hosting company started to fell the pain. When the site went down for 3 days, it was time to make the change.
I don’t know anything about VPS, and everything I read about it indicated it was the correct solution for my situation. I switched to a VPS server with webintellects.
Now i am able to host my sites freely on 100% resources that i am getting. basically there is not much price difference between the shared and VPS plans these days but the downtime severely impacted my revenue. Moving my site to VPS was a good choice and it made my sites load 10 times faster.
I’ll plan to move to dedicated server once number of sites increase or i get really big traffic, hope that happens soon
~~Miller~~