Can your shared hosting account accommodate 5 million page views per month? If I told you that the average shared hosting account could easily accommodate that many page views you might laugh at me and accuse me of being naive. But the fact is that 5,000,000 page views would amount to just under two page views per second. That’s tiny for modern servers.
Don’t forget about concurrency
So why does
shared hosting so often fail? It has to do with the other part of the hosting equation: concurrency. If you’ve never heard of concurrency, the simple way to understand it is in relation to the number of people who want to view a page at the exact same moment.
When concurrency is high (many people access the same resource at the same moment), then you can run into trouble. In fact, the same server that could deliver 5,000,000 page views per month might crash if only 500 people ask for a page at the same exact moment.
The way to achieve high concurrency is to have many servers and distribute the work among them. To extend the example above, imagine that each of your servers can serve 16 pages per second. If you want to accommodate the burst of 500 people all at once, you will need 500/16 = 31.25 servers. That many servers can cost a fortune.
5 minutes of fame
One drawback to acquiring 31 servers is that you don’t always need to accommodate spikes in traffic. In fact, most of the time