There are a few questions that come to mind when you decide to opt-in for a shared hosting service to host your website. One of them is how much traffic they can handle. Knowing the answer to this question is important to every website owner. However, before we proceed to talk about traffic and shared hosting, we need to fully understand the concept of a shared hosting service and how it works.
What is Shared hosting?
A shared web hosting service is one that allows many websites to store data on a single server. It simply means that the website will share the resources of a physical server with several other websites. In shared hosting, each customer will have access to features like disc space, databases, email accounts, monthly traffic, FPL accounts, etc offered by the server.
Each website is allotted a certain percentage of resources eg: RAM, CPU, Apache server, mail server, based on the plan paid for. This way, as long as your website doesn’t draw resources beyond what it is allotted to it, you shouldn’t have any problem. Most web hosting companies have a fair use policy that ensures everyone has access to a fair amount of resources.
Customers using the shared hosting platform’s service do not only share the resources of the server but also the cost of maintaining a single server. This makes shared hosting the most cost-effective way of hosting a website. It’s very popular and the perfect choice for people running a small online business or startup, people experimenting with web design and coding, and generally for people with low budgets.
Additionally, shared hosting packages come with easy-to-use and user-friendly features that allow you to operate your website with ease. However, as your website grows in popularity and receives more traffic, the performance will be greatly affected. This makes it very important to know how much traffic your shared hosting plan can handle before the performance starts to suffer.
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How Much Traffic Can Shared Hosting Handle?
Honestly, there are no straight answers to the above question, however, it is safe to say that it depends on some factors which will be outlined and explained below. These factors generally have a great impact on your website’s performance. They are as follows;
- The Type Of Provider You Choose
This is one of the ultimate factors to consider as far as shared hosting is concerned. Some providers oversell their servers. This creates a huge problem for websites hosted on the servers especially when each receiving a decent amount of traffic. It greatly affects the performance of the websites negatively.
- The Amount Of Cpu And Ram They Store
The amount of CPU, RAM, and storage the server uses is very important as each server only has a limited amount of resources. These resources will be shared on-demand among each customer. Having more RAM allows for more data and instructions to be accessed by the CPU. More CPU power or a faster clock speed allows for more instruction to be executed each second which means more performance.
- Pinging Server Location
The location of your server is a very important factor. If your shared hosting server is located far away, your website may load slowly. This is majorly due to high latency. In the same light, a server located in the same geographical regions will make your website load faster and also give you SEO advantages.
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- Other Client’s Activities
If a website sharing the same server with yours begins to receive a huge amount of traffic continuously, it will impact the performance of your site as well as other websites on the same server.
You can check with your host about some of the above-mentioned factors. For others, you may have to run numerous tests and utilize a few tools to determine them. Knowing these things will help you understand better how much traffic your shared hosting plan can handle. Typically, a good and reliable shared hosting service should be able to handle at least 2000 – 3000 visitors daily, or 60,000 – 100,000 monthly.
Shared hosting has lots of upsides which makes it a great choice for many. It is cost-effective and can handle a few thousand visitors daily. However, if you want more power and space, then a managed VPS (virtual private server) may be the way forward.
