Let’s look at how bandwidth, reliability, and scalability affect how much website traffic a shared hosting plan can handle.
What Is Shared Hosting?
Every website requires a server to relay data to its visitors. Hosting providers manage this, often presenting dedicated server options that allocate a personal server for unrestricted use. In contrast, shared hosting means your website resides on a server alongside numerous others.
Interestingly, the shared hosting subsector is expected to grow by 10.3% yearly.
From personal experience, I’ve always opted for shared hosting during a website’s early stages due to the typically low initial traffic, making it cost-effective. This approach is common for many new websites, with the exception of those launched by well-established entities anticipating immediate high traffic.
The Pros & Cons of Shared Hosting
To determine if shared hosting suits your situation, consider the following:
Pros:
- Affordability: Pricing plans range from $2.95 – $49.99/month.
- Peace of mind: Many plans have uptime guarantees.
- Convenience: Providers handle upkeep and maintenance, meaning less hassle for you.
- User-friendliness: Providers cater to everyday users and prioritize seamless use.
- Flexibility: You can always upgrade your plan if your requirements change.
Cons:
- Traffic limits: Because your website shares a server with others, the provider has to limit the resource usage of each site to ensure all sites work.
- Bandwidth limits: If your site exceeds the provider’s allocated limits, they may throttle your bandwidth or ask you to reduce your usage or upgrade.
- Scalability limits: At some point, your needs and site size may exceed the shared server’s capabilities.
Shared hosting resource allocation differs from provider to provider, but you can expect some limits.
5 Factors Affecting Shared Hosting’s Traffic Capacity
Roughly five main factors can impact your hosting plan’s capacity to handle website traffic.
- Bandwidth caps: This refers to limits set by the hosting provider that specify the amount of data your site can transfer over a set period of time.
- CPU usage: This includes web apps, scripts, and other backend software that use finite processor resources.
- RAM usage: As with CPU usage, backend software requires RAM, and the shared hosting server has a limited amount.
- Page weight: This is the total amount of data from images, text, JavaScript, CSS, and more, the sum of which equals the amount of bandwidth needed per page view.
- CDN offloading: Using a content delivery network (CDN) reduces your CPU, RAM, and bandwidth usage, allowing for more traffic.
Much like a personal computer, a shared hosting server is equipped with a CPU, RAM, and storage (either hard disk or SSD). Determining the storage used by your site is straightforward—it’s essentially the total size of your content, databases, and other components.
But CPU and RAM usage depend on several factors, including the type of back-end software, traffic volume, and the nature of your content
For instance, a basic text-only website consumes minimal CPU and RAM, allowing it to support vast traffic without overburdening the server. In contrast, a website with complex back-end computations, such as one offering APIs, demands more CPU and RAM, limiting its traffic capacity.
Therefore, you can tweak your site to handle more traffic by reducing features requiring back-end resources. A feature-rich social media-style user system enhances user engagement, but it would also increase resource usage.
Can a Shared Hosting Plan Handle Your Website’s Traffic?
Before you can do anything else, you’ll first need to find out how much bandwidth you’re using. Your web host should provide some control panel to let you see relevant data, including bandwidth usage.
That will also give you basic analytics, but you may want to use a tool like Google Analytics to gather more comprehensive data.
Having detailed data allows you to assess whether your usage aligns with the limits of your shared hosting plan. The restrictions vary based on your web host and your chosen specific plan. Some plans cap the overall traffic, while others limit bandwidth or disk space.
Many shared hosting plans can handle quite a lot of traffic, such as thousands of visitors a day—especially if it is “light” content like text.
4 Tips for Optimizing Your Shared Hosting Plan
If you’re nearing the upper limit of your shared hosting plan, there are some strategies you can implement before migrating to dedicated hosting. These strategies can prevent a website crash without costing you more money.
- Optimize Images: Minimize data transfer by reducing image sizes. For WordPress users, plugins can automatically resize images, serving smaller versions unless a full-size is requested.
- Use External Hosting for Large Files: For sizable downloads like videos or PDFs, use external platforms. For instance, host videos on YouTube and embed them in your articles, leveraging YouTube’s bandwidth instead of yours.
- Limit Plugins: For WordPress sites, reduce the number of active plugins. Only keep those that add significant value to your website.
- Streamline Content: Consider if your content truly needs multiple images. Often, a text-focused approach can be just as effective and less resource-intensive.
Deciphering Shared Hosting’s Traffic Limits
Shared hosting plans are economical and can handle plenty of traffic when you follow the tips above. Sometimes, shared hosting performance isn’t enough, or traffic spikes may cause you to exceed available resources, leading to site slowness or outages.
It’s essential to monitor your bandwidth usage and to continually optimize your site, whether by reducing image sizes, limiting plugins, or streamlining content.
While shared hosting can accommodate a significant amount of traffic, especially for text-centric content, it’s vital to continually assess and adapt based on your site’s needs and growth. Always prioritize user experience and consider the trade-offs between features and resource usage.
