Question

I have searched for an already answered question regarding this topic, but I can hardly find what I seek.

My question is simple and straightforward: I have a blog on .com domain which uses wordpress software and is currently hosted at a company in my country. It currently supports only 30 concurrent connections. I’m pretty familiar with those terms but if the traffic on my website will go very high, I’m considering to buy servers and host it at home instead of getting a more expensive hosting plan. If I do so, what do I need? For example: how many concurrent connections will a server (PC) handle? How many and powerful servers you need for, say, 1 milion daily unique visits?

Answer 1

Depending on your website optimization and caching and hardware requirements, any moderate pc today can handle 1 million daily visits easily.

1m requests per day = ~11 requests per second, which really isn’t that much, assuming the sql optimization is NOT really bad.

I would suggest that you start hosting up the site on the hardware you have, whatever it is, and monitor real stats/statistics, and see for yourself what kind of hardware you might need, this experiment will tell you whether you want to optimize more or not, and if you need a fast cpu, or more ram.

You need to consider few important things on the long run, like power bills and backups.

Some draft hardware requirements:

1. CPU: any Core i3 2xxx or Core i3 3xxx or faster.
2. RAM: ram is really cheap these days, go for 8gb or 16gb, I do not see one site needing that much, but extra ram will help with harddisk IO read caching.
3. Storage: All storage devices need to be in RAID1 or any other RAID that provide some redundancy, plus some daily/weekly backups, .. consider getting SSDs from a reputable brand (Intel or Samsung) with 5 years warranty.
4. Power Backup: Get a UPS

Those might be an overkill (depending on the amount of optimization you will have), but they should give you a nice and relatively fast server.