I have a drupal based site. The front page is about 200kb and I have 10 trimmed topics in front page. Currently the site is hosted on a shared server. My question is how many hits or page loads per hour/minute should I have before it would be necessary to switch to a dedicated server?
My host is hostgator.
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This is not a simple question to answer. You can have ONE user that could technically make your website use more that is allocated shared CPU server usage. Hits wouldn’t do anything unless it is the 1000s per second. You would need to move to a dedicated server once you start pushing the CPU of the shared server more than allocated to your account. Which with hostgator I am sure is like .03 CPU usage if you read your contract. A dedicated server would allow you 100% CPU usage. I would suggest starting with a VPS that is managed from Server Intellect. This will allow you to host your sites and not have to understand all the aspects of maintaining a server.
The switch to a dedicated server will certainly be determined by the resources consumed by your Drupal portal versus what the server can handle and not by the hits/visits. Although the two are correlated to an extent on most configurations I have worked on (more visits results in more consumed resources).
Server resources are CPU, memory, hard drive space, and bandwidth (traffic). The 200kb you mentioned relates more to bandwidth. The ones that shared providers penalize the most on are CPU and memory usage. A Drupal portal will consume a considerable amount of those two especially if you use a lot of the Drupal plugins/features.
For example, if your web hosting account consumes most resources for extended periods of time by using up a large amount of memory or peg the CPU, the provider (Hostgator in this case) will most likely suspend your account.
How do you keep track of resources that your account consumed? This is unfortunately not possible with a shared account. Shared accounts don’t provide the tools necessary for you to “gauge” for resources usage. Good providers will warn you before suspending your account but don’t count on that. Be on top of it. Keep historical data of visits per day and per month, etc. If you notice drastic increases in visits (20% month over month), start planning for an upgrade.
By the way, my name is Joe and I help run a fully managed dedicated server company that goes by the name UNIXy. I’ll be glad to answer any question you have. Let me know if you need a hand as well. My email is joe@unixy.net.
Best