My site gets about 6000 visitors a day with around 24,000 page views. Due to some media coverage my site is now jumping up to around 17,000 visitors a day with around 114,000 page views. Last Monday my site was on a shared server with godaddy. I was told my bandwidth was fine but because I had so many simultaneous connections it would load wrong. Because of this my site would be unavailable or have problems loading images. I have switched my site to a virtual dedicated server with 512m of ram it can go up to 2gigs during serge’s. I also have an intelcellon processor with 2.3 GHz. Will this new server be able to handle my traffic? Could be as many as 20,000 visitors and I know about 65% of this traffic will come during a 4 hour period.
hey mate, why not using dedicate server instead? i dont really know if it's gonna be fine but virtual server is at least better than share hosting.
There are too many variables involved to give a 'yes' or 'no' answer on a situation like that. Content: is it largely static, dynamically generated or a mix of both? If dynamic, how is it generated? Is it optimised in any way? Des it need to be dynamic? Can you cache it during peak periods? Apache configs: have you done any performance tuning; what MPM are you using? etc. What might be a determining factor at your peak periods is whether users enter your site and stay. If they simply visit, click a few pages and leave within, say, a few minutes, then the numbers you have given (65% of, say, 120K page views ~ 80K pages in 4 hours) should be well within the comfort zone of a default Apache setup (for static content or dynamic content with low overhead.) If you are planning to increase traffic further, then you might want to look in to a dedicated box as toby mentioned.