On a "typical" mid-range shared hosting account how many "people" can connect to a website at the same time?

What do you mean by typical? What is typical account for you first of all?

Originally Posted by SiberForum

What do you mean by typical?

Glad you responded.

I mean that "generic" mid-range shared hosting account that many of us buy from one of a small number of hosting providers mentioned repeatedly on forums, etcetera. Go-da**y, hos**ons***, hostg**or, etcetera, all seem to offer what I am referring to for about U.S. $7.95, + or - a dollar or two, a month. I am beginning to recognize that many apparently knowledgeable webmasters use the term "over-selling" when referring to such hosting packages. These "over-sold", "one size fits all", website hosting packages priced under U.S. $8 per month are what I am referring to.

I ask because I recently have become more aware of webmasters who use such hosting packages that have had their website(s) "turned-off", or something similar, as a result of a big "simultaneous" surge in their traffic because they wrote good link bait and got "dugg" or something.

Anyway, I am in the first phase of a marketing strategy that I am planning to use to send a huge amount of traffic to one particular website, currently on a "typical" mid-range hosting plan, that I am working on. The marketing strategy includes everything from postcards sent via the Postal Service to magazine ads and "funnel-sites".

If I complete this strategy the way I want to, then, I fully expect, some months from now, when I get "everything" in place, to get a huge amount of traffic on my website over a short period of time.

I have read of webmasters who had under 200 simultaneous connections to their website having the sites "turned off" by the hosting provider.

What I am planning is, FOR ME, an important project. I am virtually certain that, if I do it the way I have it planned, I will be getting far more than 200, or even 1000, simultaneous connections to my website for, at least, a week. If that large number of connections to my website, on a shared hosting plan, causes it to be "turned off", then, my entire project could be ruined.

Obviously, I need to avoid that so I am trying to gather information about the simultaneous connections issue so that I can avoid the problem if the issue is one that will affect my website assuming I get the aforementioned high number of simultaneous connections.

I would rather not raise this particular issue with the shared hosting providers because I do not want to unnecessarily focus their attention on my hosting account.

Incidentally, is there a resource that provides statistics on this issue or a formula to determine it? For example, "Acme website gets 2.83 million visitors per month. How many simultaneous connections are made to Acme website, on average, per hour?"

note: Looks like you responded to my thread in about 30 minutes. I wish I realized you had responded, but I assumed it would be a long time before/if I got any response in the thread. Thanks.

You are going to run into serious problems with a shared hosting account. Its not really the connections, its the combined CPU power those connections create. And any host that cares about the rest of its customers is going to make sure that the CPU is fairly shared.

For this kind of project a dedicated server (or a VPS although I rarely recommend those is needed). You can in come cases get a dedicated server for pretty cheap now. IE we have sold some as low as $49, actually we have some of those in stock.

I would NOT recommend any shared solution though, I mean your putting in a lot of money and time in your marketing, you need a solution that is going to work

Originally Posted by webcs

You are going to run into serious problems with a shared hosting account.

Thankyou for responding.

There is much to consider before I put this one site on a dedicated server or VPS.

Although my important "deadlines" are virtually a year away the majority of the first phase of development and marketing for this particular site must still be implemented.

I will probably just continue working on the first phase while devoting a small amount of time to researching and, hopefully, making a decision on the dedicated server or VPS issue later.

I have already allocated monies for a lot of things, including the hosting for a good number of "funnel sites", but this dedicated server issue has not been a consideration. I would prefer to get the "funnel sites" up within the next 60 days, at least, because there might be "sandbox" periods imposed by various search engines that I want the "funnel sites" to complete well in advance of my "deadlines".

Anyway, I guess I would rather continue without a dedicated server or VPS hosting, FOR NOW, for the one particular website that is the focus of this project.

In about 90 days or so, if development and marketing is otherwise progressing on schedule AND IF I begin to see traffic patterns which indicate my plan is working as expected then, at that time, I will probably be very encouraged to move the main website to a dedicated server or to a VPS. But, especially considering that I just added a dedicated IP, etcetera, to the main website(shared hosting), I think I should be cautious about over-spending or unnecessarily spending.

I have, this month, got a big, at least it is big to me, postal service mailing going out in relation to this project. A mailing that, itself, was not part of the original budget and, thus, required monies that I had not expected to spend on mailing. IF that brings in the $$$ that I believe it is capable of then a dedicated server or VPS will definitely be the best hosting arrangement for the main site.

The fact that this dedicated server or VPS issue is probably a factor for this project sure does disappoint me, though. I just about completely overlooked it.

Anyway, the good thing, I guess, is that this particular website has been designed to be very fast, even over 56k, because I used methods that, as I understand it, place far less load on the cpu/server. The vast majority of the pages are static html, all except a few webpages on the site are *valid code, including CSS and RSS validated, and I am even making preparations to add a popular plugin to the blog on the site that reduces the "load" the blog places on the cpu/server by creating(serving) static html pages where possible for the blog instead of the dynamic pages that the blog serves for the standard installation. When I get around to installing that plugin I hope I do not run into problems, though. Hopefully, these factors will prevent me from running into shared hosting server/cpu "load" issues before I can make the necessary, IF ANY, changes to my hosting plan.

note: I have so much stuff, on this project alone, to do that my head could get to spinning any time now. I really must be cautious about what I spend, though. Right now I am making preparations, although I have not done this yet, to move what, to me, are a lot of domain names to my own domain name reseller account. I had planned to do this, but I never planned to do it NOW; so, that will mean spending more money that I did not expect to.

*valid code - The blog, which is not my code and which I would not even be capable of coding, is not validating, but I made a decision to fix that later.

It seems to me that many webpages will work fine even if they are not valid code so that is not why I prefer my pages to be valid, but the blog package I use is probably the most well known and popular so I figured that it would be OK until I get to fixing it.

I don't think it's the load that'll cause the problems - as most hosts could probably handle it - but rather the Bandwidth you'll be utilizing. Such a high amount of traffic is bound to use up a vast majority of the hosts BW. This begins to be a problem when you're stuck with a host that oversells. You'll be kicked off the server, for essentially utilizing more than the "average" user - even though you're paying for "unlimited" or x TB.

If you have no idea. And that is ok because web hosting accounts are different. I assume if you run test on the account you will get results and understand what can you expect on
Hope that helps

You are looking to test that seems to be so I would recommend avoid that with web hosting acount while important files are needed to be hosted.