Dumb question, but how much traffic can my site sustain?

[PNPx]

I'm sure there probably isn't a completely accurate way to guage how much traffic I can have on my site at once, but I was wondering if anyone can give me even some idea. A few of the posts I've read here seem indicate that shared hosting isn't really good for high traffic, and I'm not really sure what high traffic is. 200 users at a time? 3000? I'm sure it depends on what is going on on the site. So I am extremely paranoid about having a surge of visitors that causes my site to become a drain... leading to it having to be shut down. And next week I will definitely have a lot of people viewing my site.

http://www.game-o-pedia.com/

Above is my site. I assume certain things are more demanding on a site than others. I have a game browser in the middle of the page which takes a second or two to load for me... is this the sort of thing that might be a drain on resources if hundreds of people were clicking on the site? Or is it some laughable relic that uses nothing at all? I'm a total beginner at this stuff. Looking around the site is there anything that might be a problem? My worry is that E3 is next week and I will be updating the site hourly with new content (hig-resolution images and movies) and I'm going to have a steady stream of people hitting the site all week. I've never really opened the site or any site to a large flow of visitors before so I don't know what kind of numbers I am looking at.

So, imagine I have hundreds of high-resolution images and movies and a swarm of people are on my site looking at them. Does it simply come down to my bandwidth? What point will the site start to slow down? Could it sustain say, 100 people viewing/downloading at once? As I said I understand there may not be a direct answer to this question, but, hopefully it at least makes sense. I'm basically just trying to find out if I open my site up to a lot of people whether or not it can survive it or how much it can handle period.

[Elite]

Andrew is probably best placed to give actual numbers (although that is probably impossible with so many unknown variables), but I believe the main problem causers are large/many sql queries on pages & including/requiring many files paticullaly those with many queries on them. I don't think bandwidth is an issue as long as you have enough available

From mysql make sure you are only retreiving the data you need (don't use select *, only get the fields you need and use limit clauses)

If you are expecting a large number of visitors maybe consider caching your content

Without sounding evil I would hope that your site would suspended before it slowed down/ground to a hault. As this is a shared hosting environment everyone elses sites would also slow down & die and that would be bad

Your not on my server are you?

[PNPx]

That's exactly what I want to avoid - screwing up someone else's site. If it sounds like my site will cause problems I'm simply not going risk it.

[AndrewT]

While I can't say for certain, just by looking at your main page it seems like the site could easily be a problem with a lot of visitors due to the large amount of PHP/MySQL being used.

Downloading files is not so much of an issue. All servers have 100Mbps connections and we've never had a customer come even remotely close to filling that bandwidth. But even at 10Mbps utilization you would reach your bandwidth limit quickly.

If you will just be doing this for E3, you might want to consider taking the old site offline and offering a static HTML site with all of the relevant content on it during this time. This would certainly lower the risk of problems arising, but I can't guarantee that it will eliminate it.

[PNPx]

Thanks for the feedback, Andrew. I think I'll use the weekend to plan a solution.

[samsam]

Don't lose any sleep over it

But really, if these stats from your site are any guide to historical traffic:

Members: 19
Hits: 20915
Hits Today: 82
Unique Hits: 161
Unique Hits Today: 10

and you have only 98 members in your forum, I can't foresee any problems now or in the future, even on shared hosting at Dathorn. A melt-down doesn't look imminent.

And while it is correct to plan for the worst, perhaps you may be optimistic about having hundreds of people per hour suddenly appear on your site during E3.

There will be a lot of other media covering E3 (to saturation point) so there will be a lot of competition for E3 game news, esp re PS3, Wii etc etc.

So, I think you will probably ride this event out without any problems.

Having said that, since your Dathorn server seems to host 1700+ other web sites too according to domaintools, I guess how things go will also depend on what else is happening on that box at the time, of course...

Either way, let us know how it went

[rod]

well, my site was cancelled for about 350 simultaneous users.

Try looking for a cache script to avoid this.

[samsam]

well, my site was cancelled for about 350 simultaneous users.

Try looking for a cache script to avoid this.

What was the application you were running, just out of curiosity?

Some kind of forum or CMS?

PHP caches are certainly nice for many of those

[rod]

I was using php nuke

An application pre installed in dathorn, but they dont really have support, if they had suggested to me using a cache, my site will still be here at dathorn.

[ChrisTech]

well, my site was cancelled for about 350 simultaneous users.

Try looking for a cache script to avoid this.

PhPNuke and 350 simultaneous users is a load. Espically when you check how many queries your site is using then multiple that by 350. If you have that many users online at once, you need to look into getting a dedicated server.

[samsam]

I was using php nuke

An application pre installed in dathorn, but they dont really have support, if they had suggested to me using a cache, my site will still be here at dathorn.

Thanks.

I'm impressed though with 350 simultaneous users. That's a serious level of traffic, esp as ChrisTech says when you multiply 350 simultaneous users x perhaps 10 SQL queries per user No wonder Andrew had a heart attack over it.

What was your secret to getting that many users to come over to your site more or less all at once?

[rod]

Well, thats what php nuke admin said, I dont know if that numbers are real.

my site has 4 and a half years

Im still in a shared hosting, but with a cache script, now in this new hosting I have reached 500 users.