Performance & reliability
How many visitors can a VPS handle?
A well-configured 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance serves a static site to millions of monthly visits, a cached WordPress site to roughly 300,000, and an uncached dynamic application to perhaps 30,000. The variable that dominates is caching, not hardware — the same instance differs by two orders of magnitude depending on it.
Think in requests per second at peak rather than visits per month. A million monthly visits at three pages each is about 1.2 requests per second on average, and perhaps ten at peak. That is trivial for any instance. The problem is never the average; it is the spike.
Full-page caching is the single largest lever available. Serving a cached HTML file costs microseconds; rendering the same page through PHP and a database costs tens or hundreds of milliseconds.
See also: vCPU
7 answers in Performance & reliability
- What is CPU steal time and why does it matter? Steal time is the percentage of time your virtual CPU was ready to run but the hypervisor gave the physical core to someone else. It appears as the "s…
- Why is my VPS slow? In order of likelihood: memory exhaustion causing swap thrashing, disk IO saturation, CPU steal time on shared cores, an unoptimised database, or netw…
- How much latency should I expect from a VPS? Within a metro, under 5 ms. Within a continent, 10–40 ms. Across the Atlantic, 70–90 ms. Europe to Asia, 150–200 ms. Antipodal routes, 250–320 ms. Lig…
- How do I benchmark a VPS? Measure the three things that actually vary: single-thread CPU with sysbench, disk with fio at 4K random read/write, and network with iperf3 to a know…
- How much faster is NVMe than SATA SSD? Roughly five times the random IOPS — about 500,000 versus 90,000 — and around five times lower latency, under 0.1 ms versus about 0.5 ms. Sequential t…
- What uptime should I expect from a VPS? Our SLA is 99.99% per instance, which permits about 4.4 minutes of downtime a month, and observed availability across the fleet over the last twelve m…