I don’t get how anyone can scale to millions of monthly visitors when most hosting providers impose a 5TB data transfer limit.
With that kind of cap, isn’t it impossible to handle more than around 15 million visitors per month? Even with a CDN taking on most of the load, if people are browsing multiple pages, you’d still hit that limit pretty quickly.
What am I missing here?
Are you actually hitting this limit, or is this just a theoretical concern?
If you’re trying to scale a site to 15+ million visitors, you might want to re-evaluate your hosting strategy. At that point, you’d likely need a more advanced solution and some expert advice.
Bridget said:
Are you actually hitting this limit, or is this just a theoretical concern?
If you’re trying to scale a site to 15+ million visitors, you might want to re-evaluate your hosting strategy. At that point, you’d likely need a more advanced solution and some expert advice.
This sounds more like a theoretical problem. Anyone with 15+ million visitors would already understand how to work around these limitations and use better hosting setups.
If you need more than 1TB of bandwidth, it’s time to look at dedicated servers or options with no data transfer caps.
Once you get to the point of millions of users, your business should be able to negotiate with the hosting provider for a custom plan. Standard plans aren’t designed for that level of traffic.
You’re unlikely to hit that limit unless you’re running a file-sharing or video-hosting service. And if you do hit it, just talk to support, pay a small fee, and get more traffic. No big deal.
Shared hosting is meant for smaller projects. The ‘unlimited everything’ claims are marketing fluff. When you outgrow it, move to something like AWS.
Parker said:
I don’t get how anyone can scale to millions of monthly visitors when most hosting providers impose a 5TB data transfer limit.
With that kind of cap, isn’t it impossible to handle more than around 15 million visitors per month? Even with a CDN taking on most of the load, if people are browsing multiple pages, you’d still hit that limit pretty quickly.
What am I missing here?
First, you need to be on a dedicated server. Second, you’re probably never going to have that many users. Hetzner offers 20TB per month for free, and you can buy more bandwidth for about €1 per TB after that.
Parker said:
I don’t get how anyone can scale to millions of monthly visitors when most hosting providers impose a 5TB data transfer limit.
With that kind of cap, isn’t it impossible to handle more than around 15 million visitors per month? Even with a CDN taking on most of the load, if people are browsing multiple pages, you’d still hit that limit pretty quickly.
What am I missing here?
Look for a provider that offers unmetered bandwidth. They do exist, and it’s what you’ll need if you’re concerned about hitting limits.
Parker said:
I don’t get how anyone can scale to millions of monthly visitors when most hosting providers impose a 5TB data transfer limit.
With that kind of cap, isn’t it impossible to handle more than around 15 million visitors per month? Even with a CDN taking on most of the load, if people are browsing multiple pages, you’d still hit that limit pretty quickly.
What am I missing here?
The real concern is that even some cloud providers, like Google Cloud, impose this 5TB limit on their higher-end cloud solutions. It just seems weird to offer packages with 32 CPUs and 128GB RAM but still cap data transfer at 5TB.
Even if you only have a third of 15 million users, with an active site, you’d reach that limit quickly.