During the peak hours, you get a lot of visitors at the same time. A question arises, “How many concurrent users can my website handle?”. We are here to answer the exact question.
We will take multiple factors into consideration and help you determine whether your website can handle the traffic during peak hours or not.
Let’s begin.
How many concurrent users can my website handle?
A basic shared hosting can usually handle 20 to 30 concurrent users especially if the website is resource-intensive.
It’s called “Entry Processes” in the cPanel stats. When a user makes a request, it’s considered a single-entry process. The concurrent visitors are only considered when they take action on your website.
However, if you’ve optimized your website with a lightweight theme and content, it can serve more users simultaneously. Hosting services such as Hostinger also have monthly traffic limits.
A small to medium VPS can serve between 100 to 500 concurrent users assuming you’re running a resource-intensive website. A larger VPS with proper optimization can serve more.
How to find out how many concurrent users my site can handle?
There are a number of different factors that you need to consider to find out how many concurrent users your website may handle. Here are some of them.
- Number of plugins you use and how heavy they are.
- Do you use cache plugins?
- Do you offer static content or dynamic content? Dynamic content is where the user requests the data from the server.
- What content do you upload?
- Third-party services running in your web app.
- Hosting provider and package you are using. Have you added a CDN on top of it?
- Number of inodes your server uses and CPU cycles you’re using.
Let’s understand it in-depth.
Benchmarking and Stress Testing (Best Method)
The best method to find out “how many concurrent users can my website handle” is to use stress testing tools.
Some of the popular stress test tools include Apache JMeter, LoadRunner, and Gatling. These tools simulate a bunch of users on your website doing complex tasks to test the server capacity. For normal websites, these tools can be quite complex.
Monitoring
If your server already has enough visitors, you can use monitoring tools like New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, etc. to monitor your server performance under pressure. Make sure you keep an eye on CPU usage, memory usage, response times, and error rates.
Just like stress testing tools, the monitoring tools are usually for the complex web-apps.
How do I calculate my concurrent users limit?
Many people think if there are multiple users on your website at the same time, they are considered concurrent users. However, it’s partially true. In the web hosting world, concurrent users limit applies only if they use resources.
So, here’s how you can find this out.
- Determine Average Resource Usage Per User: CPU and RAM are the two most important resources you need to measure here. Check out how many of these resources an average user uses.
- Know Your Plan’s Allocated Resources: Identify the actual limits of resources allocated to you.
Now, it’s time to calculate the concurrent users for CPU and RAM. Just divide the total resources by the average usage per user. Here’s the formula for it.
The formula is to get an estimation on how many concurrent users your website can handle. The actual number varies as we have not taken the disk I/O, network bandwidth, database, and external APIs into consideration. All these are equally responsible for concurrent users.
How to improve the performance of your website?
Let’s see how you can improve the performance of your website and allow more concurrent users.
Server Specifications
The best way to increase the performance is to get a server with more CPUs (or CPU cores), higher clock speed, more RAM, as well as faster disks (Preferably NVMe or SSD over HDD).
As you can see Contabo offers 400 GB SSD or 100 GB NVMe at the same rate.
Optimization of Web Applications
Optimization not only includes standard coding practices but also includes optimizing database queries, caching, implementing a CDN such as Cloudflare, and minifying JS.
Bandwidth and Network Infrastructure
Bandwidth can also limit the number of users. Some servers have a limited bandwidth capacity per second. If your users are consuming all of your bandwidth, your website will start facing issues.
Scalability
If your server is scalable vertically (upgrading hardware), you can try adding more RAM or bandwidth to fix the issue.
On the other hand, if your server is scalable horizontally (increasing servers) where you can add more servers/instances, you can try adding more servers as well as a load balancer.
Some cloud services like AWS, GCP, and Azure also allow autoscaling. You can surely activate autoscaling if it’s available. Cloudways is the best cloud service if you’re looking for both horizontal and vertical scaling.
Conclusion
To summarize, a shared hosting can handle around 30 concurrent connections while a VPS can handle more. It’s recommended to optimize your website to handle more users simultaneously.
A cheap VPS with a reliable provider is always better than shared hosting. Make sure it has more resources if you’re expecting more traffic.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What server size do I need for 100 users?
If you’re planning to get 100 users per day, a reliable VPS with 2 GB RAM is good enough to go ahead.
How does a website handle multiple users?
The server usually handles the users based on the resources you have. It includes CPU, RAM, IO usage, bandwidth, etc.
What is considered a high-traffic website?
A high-traffic website usually receives more than 50 concurrent users. A website receiving more than 100k users a month is considered a high-traffic website.
