How Many Daily Visitors Can a VPS Handle
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is often touted as a more powerful upgrade to shared hosting. While this may be true, have you ever wondered exactly how many daily visitors a VPS can handle?
The exact number can difficult to pin down for many reasons. The number of daily visitors a site can handle isn’t simply dependent on the type of plan. To give you a better idea of VPS capabilities, we’re going to walk through some key areas to compare.
What is VPS Hosting?
The acronym “VPS” is a perfect descriptor of the type of web hosting you’re facing here. The “Virtual” in VPS represents the fact that virtualization technology creates a “Private Server.” In this case, it’s a software-driven approach used to emulate a server environment.
VPS hosting allows providers to divide a single physical server into slices and allocate them to different users. Users still gain the same features as they would with an entire physical server.
VPS Hosting Main Features
To better understand VPS hosting, let’s look at some of the key features this type of plan brings to the table.
- Dedicated Resources – VPS accounts may come with varying system resources like CPU time allocation, operating memory, and storage space. These resources are permanently allocated to the account and not shared under any circumstances.
- Account Isolation – The virtualization technology places VPS accounts in silos. Even if a single server has multiple accounts, they will not interact (or interfere) with each other in any way.
- Scalability – VPS account users have the option to adjust the amount of resources available for their server. While the exact method may differ between hosts, the ability to rapidly scale up can be invaluable.
- Customizability – Perhaps the most frequently overlooked feature of VPS plans is the high degree of customization. You get complete control over every aspect of the account, from the choice of Operating System (OS) to the exact services you run.
Shared Hosting vs VPS Hosting
The most common comparison between shared and VPS hosting boils down to performance. Even though virtual servers excel a lot in this aspect, this is far from their only advantage.
Shared hosting is a popular option mainly because of its affordability. But to keep those low price rates, many hosts resort to clustering up to hundreds of shared hosting accounts on a single server.
VPS accounts, on the other hand, are much less densely packed. We are talking about just a handful of clients utilizing one physical machine. The reason for this is because VPS accounts get a dedicated set of system resources for their project alone.
Security should not be overlooked as well.
If a shared hosting account comes under a web attack or gets infected by malware, other users on the same server may be affected. This means you can have the sturdiest security and still risk unauthorized breaches from neighboring accounts.
The account isolation of VPS plans guarantees far better security off-the-bat. Even if another user is a victim of a hacker breach, the attacker would have no access to other virtual instances on the same server.
Shared hosting is also popular due to ease of management. You only need to focus on building your site. The hosting environment is provided and maintained by your web host, so there is little need for advanced technical skills.
While VPS might be a bit more challenging to manage, users get complete control over an entire virtual server. This allows you to set up the hosting environment to your exact specifications, often giving an edge in performance.
How to Check Your Resource Usage?
Among the Shared vs VPS hosting distinctions listed above, one of the most important is resource handling. As their name implies, shared hosting plans make use of a single pool of resources, so if other sites are excessively using them – yours will have to wait until some are available.
This waiting period is something that heavily affects your website performance.
No matter if you’re on a shared or VPS plan, it is always a good idea to monitor your resource usage from time to time.
Regardless of the hosting plan type, most will have a resource monitoring service you can launch or a quick resource usage display on your dashboard. SPanel, for example, comes with a quick resource usage box you can see on the right hand of the admin dashboard.
How Many Daily Visitors Can a VPS Handle?
Many variables come into play when calculating service capacity. Aside from the allocated resources, other factors include:
- Number of requests per page load
- Time to process each request
- Types of requests handled
- Concurrent number of visitors
- Choice of web server
To illustrate one of these points, let’s consider the concurrent number of visitors. Website visitors can arrive at any time of day. If you get 2,000 visitors per day (which isn’t that much), but they all try to load your website in the space of 1 hour, even a VPS plan may struggle to cope.
However, thanks to VPS flexibility, you can easily optimize your site to load well at all times. By monitoring visitor behavior and matching it with resource usage, you can adjust the amount of resources on your VPS account to optimal levels and scale accordingly.
Finding the Right VPS Provider
Aside from the differences in hosting plan types, there is a need to understand that the quality of service may differ between hosting providers. This can make a huge difference in how well your VPS server performs.
You can find the right VPS provider by paying attention to a few essential areas. These include:
- Reliability – Having a website that’s available 24/7 is essential to visitors. Besides, search ranking may also be affected if sites frequently suffer outages. To mitigate this, look for VPS providers that are willing to offer strict uptime guarantees.
- Security – Although VPS accounts are more secure by nature, some web hosts go the extra mile when security is concerned. Always keep an eye open for special security features or significant partnerships with notable cybersecurity companies.
- Customer Support – Given the technical nature of a VPS server, many users will inevitably need to contact the support team at some point. Ensure that adequate support channels are open and the company operators are friendly and helpful enough in times of need.
- Innovative Features – While most VPS plans are fairly similar, some service providers focus on innovations or unique product features. This allows you to get a first-hand experience of technological advancements and great service improvements.
To drive home these points, let’s take the case of ScalaHosting’s Managed Cloud VPS plans. We offer users a choice of cPanel or SPanel for VPS users – the latter being our own proprietary product. SPanel comes with fairly similar functionality to the industry-leading tools but without any licensing fees involved.
SPanel also comes with powerful unique features – SShield and SWordPress Manager.
SShield will offer your site real-time cybersecurity protection, while SWordPress Manager gives you a single point of contact to keep your WP site healthy and updated.
Conclusion
How many visitors a web hosting plan can handle cannot be put into a single figure. Too many dynamic factors are involved, and this can dramatically affect the final number. The key takeaway should be that VPS plans offer greater agility, allowing you to adjust to the needs of different types of customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is VPS shared?
Although a physical server may host multiple VPS accounts, each comes with an isolated environment and dedicated resources. This configuration gives VPS-hosted websites more reliable performance and a better security profile.
Virtual servers are shared to the extent that you can split a single physical machine into several VPS instances. Still, the complete account isolation makes this type of hosting far different from the shared service.
How many visitors can view my site at once?
The number of concurrent visitors a website can handle depends on factors including CPU power, RAM, and page size. Each visitor loading a page will drain server resources, and as they reach their limits – site performance will suffer.
How many users can a VPS handle?
How many users a VPS can handle depends on the amount of resources allocated to it and how well you construct your site. The advantage of using a VPS is that you can increase resources at any time to meet increased demand.
