Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I want to find out how much traffic my website can handle. Like for example, 1000 simultaneous requests per second, or 1 lakh visitors online.
My website is newly started, and it is on shared hosting, with unlimited bandwidth. Are there any tools for measuring the capacity of my site?
Also I want to know, what is the average capacity of traffic that a website on shared hosting can handle in general? If the requests increase more than the limit, what happens?
In regards to how much the site can support, there are many factors here:
Of course, the fact you're on a shared hosting means it's very difficult to test as well and the limits could differ - if you perform a test while another site on the same server decides to execute a very big/resource hungry SQL query then your results will be affected by this.
They key thing is to monitor the site and if/when you experience issues consider moving to a VPS with dedicated minimum resources or a dedicated server.
You could - in accordance with your hoster - run a load test on that site. There are several tools to do this, e. g. Apache ships the "ab" (Apache Benchmark) tool, to meassure pure hits and provides you with min/max/mean values. Though you should start with a low amount of requests (5 concurrent) and then start to increase the number of requests (5-10 hits/sec. steps). This will give you a basic picture of what your site might be able to handle.
Keep in mind, that if this is a shared-hosting site, that your load test might affect other websites hosted on that same server. So be gently with your testing. Also your provider might have some countermeassures in place, that might deny these kinds of load tests.
