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Like all bloggers and webmasters you start either with a shared hosting, wither you ask a friend if he can help you with hosting for your site. You assume that your website will not generate too much traffic. It is true, a shared hosting can be the best choice. A shared hosting means that on the same computer and IP are hosted more websites.

They promise you unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and will give you that. At some point your website will grow in traffic and you can see that your website and you are asking yourself if your server is strong enough.

At this point, the unlimited bandwidth and space can’t help your site. It is about the transfer speed available, and the processing speed that the server can provide to it.

Transferring pages to the clients can take up all transfer speed, and when another user want to connect he will have to wait few more seconds. As more users request a page at the same time, the low will be the response time.

The processing speed of the server is ate by the php and mysql processes, if you have wordpress those processes can really slow down your website. That can be fixed with a caching plugin, but the transfer speed can’t be increased.

How to know when you reached that point ? Go and make a stress test to your website. I am using LoadImpact .Think about how many visitors do you have at maximum on your blog, and then see how your website responds during the stress test with the same amount of visitors. You can use a plugin to see how many visitors are online at a same time.

If you get more than 10 seconds, it is probably time to move on. If you got that value means that your website already receives a lot of visitors simultaneously and you can afford buying something better: a dedicated server.

I am currently using a shared hosting account and i have another website which receives about 3k views every day. My shared server handle that load very well so far, i don’t plan to move on so soon. I’m using hostgator right now and i am happy with.