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How many visitors can handle a small VPS?
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How many visitors can handle a small VPS?

Hi everyone!

This is most likely a question you've seen a lot of times on the Internet, but I never saw a clear answer. Let's put this in perspective. If I would like to go for a "small VPS,“ like 1.5 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, how much traffic do you think that a small machine can handle?

Let's say that there is only one WordPress site on the server.

Thanks a lot!

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Comments

  • 76

    Thanked by 1ehab
  • VoidVoid Member
    edited December 2022

    42

    Thanked by 1ehab
  • 55

    Thanked by 1ehab
  • I am asking for monthly traffic! I believe it is more capable of handling more network traffic.

  • CalinCalin Member, Patron Provider

    Depend on what you hosted on this WordPress website , it s very complicated for explained

    Depend, for example simple text website don t use lot of traffic, But if you have only pictures, or videos will be a massive use of traffic

    Regards,
    Calin

  • I am sorry guys, but I do not understand what those numbers means, are you talking about connections? 69, 76, 42, 55 only?

  • @Calin said:
    Depend on what you hosted on this WordPress website , it s very complicated for explained

    Depend, for example simple text website don t use lot of traffic, But if you have only pictures, or videos will be a massive use of traffic

    Regards,
    Calin

    Let's say that is a normal blog. Some pictures obviously, but no videos.

  • @Sapcedor said:
    I am sorry guys, but I do not understand what those numbers means, are you talking about connections? 69, 76, 42, 55 only?

    push ups

  • Very helpful.. > @alilet said:

    @Sapcedor said:
    I am sorry guys, but I do not understand what those numbers means, are you talking about connections? 69, 76, 42, 55 only?

    push ups

    Very helpful....

    Thanked by 1WebProject
  • @Sapcedor said: I am asking for monthly traffic!

    monthly traffic for small VPS?
    Check your VPS provider how many GB/TB traffic per month you have and that is your limit obviously!

  • Depends on the site and the type of content you are serving.

  • On serious note your question was already answered by Calin.
    Your question is one of the types of
    How many km/miles I can do on 20gallons/liters of petrol via my vehicle?

    Some vehicles That May Be Related or not to the question.

    Thanked by 1gbzret4d
  • armandorgarmandorg Member, Host Rep

    @JabJab said:
    On serious note your question was already answered by Calin.
    Your question is one of the types of
    How many km/miles I can do on 20gallons/liters of petrol via my vehicle?

    Some vehicles That May Be Related or not to the question.

    This^

    You have asked either the wrong question or have left the question uncompleted.

  • probably at least 3

  • None if you dont install a webserver

    Thanked by 3emgh vyas11 Pwner
  • ericlsericls Member, Patron Provider

    Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease(bottle-necked by network), and you can also hand over most of it to CDNs that sit in front of it. so millions of users per day is easy

  • @rober7 said:
    None if you dont install a webserver

    or if it's powered off

    Thanked by 1WebProject
  • @ericls said:
    Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease(bottle-necked by network), and you can also hand over most of it to CDNs that sit in front of it. so millions of users per day is easy

    Thank you so much for taking this seriously. Actually, this is the type of information I'm looking for: how many requests a small VPS can handle if the monthly traffic (visitors) is high. 

    Appreciate it!

  • WebProjectWebProject Host Rep, Veteran

    WordPress without any optimisation max 10 visitors 😂

    Thanked by 1kasodk
  • pbxpbx Member
    edited December 2022

    You have your answers:

    @ericls said: Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease

    @WebProject said: WordPress without any optimisation max 10 visitors

    If you wanna have a lot of concurrent request you'll have to use some caching and let nginx distribute these static files really fast.

    I'd recommend something like this: https://www.keycdn.com/support/wordpress-cache-enabler-plugin#nginx

    Nginx fastcgi cache would work nicely as well: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_fastcgi_module.html

    Thanked by 1Sapcedor
  • @Sapcedor said:

    @ericls said:
    Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease(bottle-necked by network), and you can also hand over most of it to CDNs that sit in front of it. so millions of users per day is easy

    Thank you so much for taking this seriously. Actually, this is the type of information I'm looking for: how many requests a small VPS can handle if the monthly traffic (visitors) is high. 

    Appreciate it!

    You still don't understand @ericls's answer..
    Go listing your small vps full specs and your script to install wordpress

  • @easy said:

    @Sapcedor said:

    @ericls said:
    Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease(bottle-necked by network), and you can also hand over most of it to CDNs that sit in front of it. so millions of users per day is easy

    Thank you so much for taking this seriously. Actually, this is the type of information I'm looking for: how many requests a small VPS can handle if the monthly traffic (visitors) is high. 

    Appreciate it!

    You still don't understand @ericls's answer..
    Go listing your small vps full specs and your script to install wordpress

    You sure? I did not know we knew each other. Your point of view is very interesting. Thank you for your valuable comment.

  • @easy said:

    @Sapcedor said:

    @ericls said:
    Depends on how cache friendly it is. If it's very cache friendly, it can handle 2000 requests per second with ease(bottle-necked by network), and you can also hand over most of it to CDNs that sit in front of it. so millions of users per day is easy

    Thank you so much for taking this seriously. Actually, this is the type of information I'm looking for: how many requests a small VPS can handle if the monthly traffic (visitors) is high. 

    Appreciate it!

    You still don't understand @ericls's answer..
    Go listing your small vps full specs and your script to install wordpress

    Actually, to answer my question, you do not need more details. Erics provided the precise estimate I required. Anyway, I can check myself using a stress testing tool, but. I thought the community would be willing to help. Thanks again.

  • AXYZEAXYZE Member
    edited December 2022

    Everybody will say same thing: depends on site.

    There's a lot of limiting factors.
    If site is 2MB then on 1Gbit ( so 125 MByte) connection you can send your page to 62 visitors every second.
    If site is 1MB then up to 125 visitors per second.
    RAM and CPU didnt change, but you have 2x difference already just because site has less or more weight to it.

    Then there comes caching. Both on client side and server side.
    If client was on your site in last week and you have correct caching headers that means he doesn't need to redownload images, styles etc. if they didnt change, he will just downloaded changed content which can be just 20% of 1MB site.
    It means that you can server more than 125 visitors, but how much exactly depends on how many % of visitors are fresh and how many already visited.

    That's why we can't do proper calculations, even can't say any range. It can be 60 visitors per second for heavy site, it can be 500 visitors per second for ligher site that has returning visitors. More than 10x difference without talking about CPU and RAM.

    Now lets talk about CPU **and **RAM. These specs don't matter at all for serving pages (sending is not intensive process), these specs matter only if you need generate pages.

    Wordpress is querying database for newest content (comments, post content etc.) and is generating page. By default if generates fresh page for every visits.
    Above I wrote about 60 visitors per second, but what if you need to generate 60 pages per second? That is a problem, this is why we need solid CPU and RAM for hosting.

    We have solution for this problem - server-side caching. Cache will store recent data (database query or whole generated page) on disk or RAM.
    You can cache on several layers
    Database cache by using Redis (in-memory database) - Wordpress can generate pages quicker, doesn't need to wait that much for database query.
    Page cache by using Wordpress plugins - whole page will be cached, so Wordpress doesnt need to generate anything. Cache will be purged/invalidated when you will make changes to page.
    Page cache done by webserver (nginx / litespeed) - web server will cache requests, PHP/Wordpress won't be called at all.

    You can combine these layers or do just one.
    In terms of speed if you send data faster then site is faster.
    First request goes to web server, then PHP/Wordpress, then database.
    So fastest way is to cache directly on web server. It will also massively reduce resource usage, as PHP doesn't need to be spawned most of the time, database can just sit on disk without loading anything to RAM.

    So we should all use caching on web server?
    Every layer will introduce some quirks.

    Database cache will give you less quirks, no compatibility errors etc.

    Page cache done by Wordpress plugins rarely gives problem. For example it can serve outdated version of site if site wasn't purged from cache - can happen with some plugins that are fetching data from 3rd party sites (for example external comments). Most popular plugins won't give you these problems, this is safe bet for 99% uses. If there are problems someone online can help you fix it (for example by injecting dynamic script to generated static page).

    Web server caching gives most problems as its completely unaware of changes in Wordpress. You need to set correct rules, setup some cache invalidation, disable caching for different conditions (for example when visitor is logged on so he doesn't get same page as not logged in user, opposite thing can happen too - random visitor can get page that was meant for logged in user which can leak their info. Be cautious when you're setting it up!!). In exchange web server caching is light. Super light. If site is light enough then it can serve like 6-10k people PER SECOND on simple VPS for couple of bucks. Difference in performance is huge, but also it is very difficult to setup that's why either learn a lot or hire professional. There's no way your server will be too slow after that.

    There's way to get very close to web server caching speed with page cache easy of use.
    For Nginx you have "Cache Enabler" plugin.
    For Litespeed you have "LiteSpeed Cache".
    These plugins will generate pages that are sent directly from web server, but they also make sure that cache will be invalidated if you make changes to pages.
    USE THEM.
    Why I'm saying its "very close to web server"? Because if you do custom config for nginx you can tweak a lot of things, modify page with pagespeed module, create cache in tmpfs in order to have everything in RAM etc. but 99% people shouldn't go that far.

    Definitive answer

    SO. If you understand what I wrote above then I can give you answer to your question.
    If you follow my caching advice by using good caching plugin then 2vCPU + 1.5GB server you are asking about will be likely limited by network speed.
    Realistic scenario: page is 1MB, but 50% of visitors are returning or already were on different page on your site so they have logo, style etc. cached do on average you need 700kB per visitor. Most VPSes have "up to" 1Gbit network.

    700kB * 100 = 75MB.

    So realistically you can serve up to 100 visitors per second on your VPS.

    100 per second = 6000 per minute.
    6000 per minute = 360000 per hour.

    360k per hour. That's correct.
    Of it's not like every second ideally 100 people will come to your site, but we can be sure that if server is good enough for 360k/hour then it is good enough for realistic case with 360k/day.

    360 * 30 = 10 800 000.

    So your VPS is enough for site with 10 million visitors per month.
    It can be done, its not edge case.

    If you have that much visitors then you probably have money for something better.
    You are probably in position where you are worried about things that are far away. I also did that mistake way back.

    You shouldn't really care if server is good enough these days.

    HDDs and shitty OpenVZ oversold nodes are way gone. Stop worrying about things that won't happen.
    If this server will be not powerful enough then you will just upgrade, it will be pennies for you if your site will be that big. Don't worry about it, go make content!

  • @AXYZE perfect awnser! I appreciate the time invested in providing this information. Then the VPS can serve more than enough visitors, compared to my estimate. Basically, I chose a small VPS for this project, thinking that it would be more than enough. People who don't know what they're doing may try to obtain ten times the resources they actually require.

    Thanks again!

  • @Sapcedor said:
    @AXYZE perfect awnser! I appreciate the time invested in providing this information. Then the VPS can serve more than enough visitors, compared to my estimate. Basically, I chose a small VPS for this project, thinking that it would be more than enough. People who don't know what they're doing may try to obtain ten times the resources they actually require.

    Thanks again!

    Yes. I know its hard to estimate.
    This server is good enough. :)

    Just don't waste your resources with some heavy control panel that itself uses 1GB of RAM!

    Use Webinoly, Slickstack, WordOps, Centminmod... all these will install very nicely configured stack for Wordpress, take care of important things (SSL cert renew etc.) and you can add another Wordpress site in minutes!
    They don't have pretty web GUI, you set up all in SSH. That way they dont need extra resources for web panel.

    Thanked by 1Sapcedor
  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    Yabs?
    '2 CPUS and 1.5GB of RAM' isn't enough information.

  • I'll add one thing only, my advice is for regular sites.

    If you plan to create something bigger for example Wordpress + WooCommerce with 1k products then there's a lot of objects to cache and 1.5GB of RAM can be too low.
    WooCommerce with like 10 products - no problem.

  • HxxxHxxx Member
    edited December 2022

    That's a shitty VPS. It wont handle much. vCores are threads basically and 1.5GB nowadays is like the new 512MB, barely handle shit. Do you value your time? Because certainly making wordpress work fine in a VPS with these resources will require hard work. Honestly if your budget is that low... just buy SHARED HOSTING or a RESELLER HOSTING, it will run better.

    Emphasis on VPS. You are using your resources for the OS too. While on a shared or reseller hosting you are not using the resources for the OS and also they usually come with litespeed, cloudlinux, etc things that adds value.

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