Shared Hosting is a viable, cost-effective, and popular means for individuals and small business owners to possess a hosting package for their websites. However, for every hosting service you’re using, there’s always a limit to the number of visitors visiting the site and the amount of resources to use, i.e. shared hosting traffic limit exists.

Hence, in this article, we will explain what shared hosting traffic limit is, how it is measured, and what factors can affect it. We will also discuss the impact of exceeding the traffic limit, including temporary account suspension, decreased website performance, and additional fees and charges.

Understanding Shared Hosting Traffic Limit

A clear understanding of the maximum traffic limit presented by a given service provider will help you narrow your options and select the best hosting solution vital for your online success.

What Is the Shared Hosting Traffic Limit?

The shared hosting traffic limit is the maximum number of visitors you can receive on a particular hosting server or the maximum strain server resources can accept in a given period.

Generally, the term shared hosting implies hosting your website on a server that hosts other websites, of which the activities of one website do not affect the other, and the webmaster controls each site. The traffic limit imposed by various web hosting providers may vary from 50,000 to 300,000 visits per month.

Shared hosting traffic occurs when you consume more than the required resources on a single server, causing server downtime, performance issues, and temporary account suspension. However, the beauty of shared hosting is that it’s a cost-effective hosting solution, and you don’t have to worry about server maintenance or monitoring tasks.

How Is the Shared Hosting Traffic Limit Measured

When you run campaigns or other events that can cause increased visitors to your sites than what it usually receives, you can know how it will impact your hosting server by knowing how it’s measured. For example, various metrics can be employed to measure the traffic limit on shared hosting.

One major metric used by most hosting providers to estimate traffic is “page views per second.” This gives a breakdown of how many requests a server can handle. PHP and database performance are other metrics used to measure shared hosting traffic limit. Additionally, most providers offer to host plans that speculate the traffic limits allocated to each plan. Hence, you can measure the traffic limit based on the resources allocated to your subscription.

Factors Affecting Shared Hosting Traffic Limit

There are a few factors that affect shared hosting traffic limits. Popular among them is website traffic and file size. Conventionally, these factors may also extend from the hosting provider’s security vulnerabilities and performance issues. Other factors affecting shared hosting traffic limits include limited scalability, lack of SSL support, customization support, and server resources.

The Impact of Exceeding Shared Hosting Traffic Limit

Exceeding the traffic limit of a shared hosting server comes with varying impacts, often based on the indirect actions imposed by the provider or an immediate effect on the performance of your website. Here are the possible implications of exceeding the shared hosting traffic limit:

1. Temporary Suspension of Account

Your web hosting provider may redirect all traffic coming to your site to a suspension page if you exceed the traffic limit on your server. In addition, most hosting providers place limits on the resources they allocate to specific websites.

Your website may receive tremendous traffic due to a promotion or DDOS attack, leading to resource overuse. When this occurs, your hosting provider may temporarily suspend your account. This measure restricts access to your website, which can negatively affect your website’s availability, reduce your revenue, and affect your online reputation.

2. Decreased Website Performance

Exceeding the shared hosting traffic limits can also lead to decreased website performance and slower page loading times. Enormous requests by visitors on your site will increase the time the server takes to process each request.

Decreased website performance can negatively impact user experience and reduce engagement and conversions. In addition, slower page loading times are bad for business as your customers or regular visitors to your site will dump yours for any competitor. This ultimately reduces business revenue and negatively affects your ranking on search engines.

3. Additional Fees and Charges

Purchasing or subscribing to a server hosting plan is essential to accumulate the visitors you envision for your website or the project you’re developing because exceeding the shared hosting traffic limit assigned to your site can result in additional fees and charges from web hosting providers.

Although these charges may seem minute or small, they don’t affect your business revenue. However, as more of these additional fees and charges are levied against your site, they aggregate into enormous amounts and potentially impact your budget over time.

Ways to Monitor Shared Hosting Traffic

Hosting providers and website owners can use various ways to track traffic on their sites. Here are some of the primary ways to monitor shared hosting traffic.

1. Web Hosting Control Panel

The hosting control panel is a web-based interface or interactive tool website owners use to manage their servers alongside the hosted services. A control panel is an effective method to monitor all hosting services, including website traffic and data usage.

In addition, web hosting control panels allow users to monitor different types of data and statistics, such as managing domain names, determining the amount of bytes a server uses during a session, installing applications, and proper network management. Some popular hosting control panels include cPanel, Seekapanel, Plesk, Webmin, and many more.

2. Third-Party Tools and Plugins

Website owners can use third-party tools and plugins to monitor their website traffic and data usage at any point in time. Although there are numerous server monitoring software on the internet today, selecting the right one may prove difficult. However, a third-party monitoring tool can help you monitor your bandwidth, analyze your network performance, and also collect live network statuses.

Some popular tools and plugins that can be used for this purpose include WP Rocket, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, OpManager, Nagios XI, and Better Stack.

3. Contacting Web Hosting Support

Website owners can contact their web hosting provider’s support team to request information about their website’s traffic and data usage. This can make all the difference in maintaining your server’s traffic limit. Your web host must always be available to provide the information required to monitor your server and avoid technical difficulties effectively.

Website owners who are unsure about how to monitor their website’s traffic and have difficulty selecting the best third-party tool or plugin can rely on the support provided by their web hosts. Web hosting support can also be helpful for website owners looking for hosting plans that provide essential features, such as unlimited web space, high server speed, and user-friendly cPanel.

Tips to Avoid Exceeding Shared Hosting Traffic Limit

To eliminate the possibility of exceeding the shared hosting traffic limit, there are a few things you can do. First, remember that exceeding the traffic limit is not only a function of the enormous number of visitors on your site. There are other inherent factors, such as bandwidth and website content. Addressing these factors can also ensure you stay within the hosting traffic limit on your server.

Here are a few tips to consider:

1. Optimize Website Content

Your website content can accommodate a lot of space on your server, and if they are not optimized, it can reduce your site speed and cause your site to exceed the shared hosting traffic limit. In addition, optimizing your website content helps to reduce its file size and decrease its data usage. Hence, it’s crucial to include optimization as an integral part of maintaining a shared hosting server.

There are numerous things you can do to optimize your website content, as well as optimization plugins. However, the most basic way to optimize your website content is by compressing images to reduce the page load time, using text instead of images where possible, and leveraging page caching.

2. Compress Website Files

To avoid exceeding the shared hosting traffic limit and optimize their database, website owners can compress their website files to reduce their size, limit the number of stored items, and decrease their data usage.

You can employ many compression techniques as a website owner to compress your files. The practical techniques include using gzip or deflate compression for HTML, CSS, and Javascript files, moving the files to a different server, and deleting them altogether (especially if they are not essential in enhancing the overall outlook of your website content).

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help reduce your website data usage and improve the performance of your website by caching and serving content from servers closer to users. With a CDN, you can serve static files like CSS, Javascript, and images using separate servers, which reduces the load on your site’s server.

The CDN caching setup is beneficial for website owners with a lot of traffic, and if you’re running a multisite or your website is located in different parts of the world and accessed by various visitors. The best CDNs website owners can use Bunney.net, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, and Kinsta CDN.

4. Upgrade to a Higher Hosting Plan

Suppose you are still exceeding the shared hosting traffic limit for your site. In that case, you can contact your host provider to upgrade to a higher hosting plan to increase your shared hosting traffic limit and accommodate higher levels of website traffic. Most hosting providers provide up to four different shared hosting plans, so it’s necessary to go for the perfect plan to accommodate your website traffic.

Some popular hosting plan types website owners can consider includes VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting is a form of web hosting that provides a website owner an entire physical server to store their website. In contrast, VPS hosting combines shared and dedicated hosting attributes and is designed for users whose sites have exceeded the shared hosting traffic.

Conclusion

If you’re considering getting a shared hosting package, we have some good news: you can stay within your budget while still getting a great package. The performance of your shared hosting will be heavily influenced by the web hosting provider you choose. Sometimes, investing more in a better provider saves time and money.

However, it’s important to ensure you don’t exceed the shared hosting traffic limit and optimize appropriately if you’re encountering server downtime or reduced performance due to massive traffic flow on your website.

Next Steps: What Now?

• Find a reliable Shared Hosting provider
• Explore other Types of Hosting
• Learn the difference between hosting and server
• Guide to Moving to a New Web Hosting Service

Learn More About Shared Hosting

• What Is Shared Hosting? The Good, the Bad, and the Affordable
• Shared Hosting for eCommerce Websites: An Affordable Path to Online Retail
• Shared Hosting with a Dedicated IP: What Is It and Why Do You Need It?
• Shared Hosting Traffic Limit: Explore This Ultimate Guide
• Shared Hosting Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Website Safe
• Shared Hosting vs. WordPress Hosting
• Reseller vs. Shared Hosting
• VPS vs. Shared Hosting