Scaling Wordpress on a shared host

Question

I know this is a question that's going to have some very general answers, but I'm hoping for some specific examples:

If one were using a CDN and effectively caching pages, where would you say the upper limit of traffic is on a basic shared hosting account using something like BlueHost, DreamHost or Mediatemple.

Could it conceivably handle say, 100k users per month? Or is that just impossible even with caching and something like CloudFlare?

ps: Please don't recommend dedicated Wordpress hosting sites. That's not what I'm asking about.

Answer 1

100k hits per month is an average of 2 hits per minute.

If we take a guess and say that peak rate will never be more than 20x the average rate, you're still only looking at 40 hits per minute at peak, or less than 1 hit per second.

With caching, plus static assets offloaded to a CDN, serving 1 visitor every second should be trivial for any properly-configured WordPress setup, even on shared hosting, as long as it's not bogged down by tons of plugins.