Hi I am planning to buy cloud hosting and was wondering how much ram and how many cores do I require for a wordpress website, which provide downloadable content. Also what would you guys would prefer, runabove or digitalcloud? Regards
For such website I would recommen you get a VPS, a shared hosting wouldn't handle 60k visitors a day.
60k visitors daily requires at least 4GB RAM to handle it. We should care how much visitors online on the same time!
You can but 10-20$ DigitalOcean cloud hosting with Nginx as Web server also with Ngx_pagespeed module.This will handle lot of traffic.Also if possible install Varnish Cache.Check this article about DigitalOcean (http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/06/25/40-million-hits-a-day-on-wordpress-using-a-10-vps/).Also if you need an article about installing nginx with ngx_pagespeed module you can follow this http://www.thegeekbyte.com/linux/3991/how-to-install-ngx_pagespeed-with-nginx-on-ubuntu/.
Wow, some of the replies here..... To give a good answer, we need to know what your current resource usage is. When you say "cloud" what do you mean by cloud, what are you trying to accomplish & what do you think the benefit of cloud is? To be fair, the term cloud is going to vary vastly from provider to provider. On another note, "traffic" doesn't equate to anything really in terms of performance - you need some hard metrics on what type of resources you're using. For example, you can have all the RAM & CPU in the world however, it disk I/O is a problem, then that RAM & CPU isn't going to do much for slow disks. The same goes the other way around.
Actually the only one who can precisely answer this questions is you. Based on your provided info I think you better go with a provider who offer good bandwidth and fast storage. I suggest you start with minimal setup - one core and 2GB RAM and SSD storage depend on your needs. Start with a provider who allows you to scale up easily without interruption or downtime, Then watch your graphs and the answers would be right there, increase ONLY the type of resource you need not from package to another higher tier. Keep in mind, One Single dedicated core can equal few of shared ones and a decent core can do a lot with good amount of memory and stable application. That's just my opinion though...
Based on my expriences. You need at least (It is not important whether it is a VPS or dedicated or just a hosting environment, you need not just a typical spec of a hosted server, but an environment of): 8 GB RAM (4 GB would be sufficient, but it'll be suffered from the 'caching' feature. I'll explain later) 4 vCPU. For high traffics, the cores are very important (this is a must) HDD space, I believe this is not necessarily impact the performance. But you need a good 'dedicated' environment with a good HDD technology. an Enterprise HDD, such as SSD would be a better choice (SAS would be good either). Nginix + Varnsih or Litespeed + Varnish (this is a must). You can't use standard HTTP/Apache. You cannot go wrong with this 'caching' technoloy with traffic above 20k visitors a day (even this forum -digitalpoint use nginx ) Protection. You need this. Use cloudflare for beginner (as it is free). DDoS attack will be the hardest part later on.
With this kind of traffic, going to Dedicated Server is right way! Default type of X3xxx servers with 8 cores and at least 8GB RAM can handle it perfectly.