How Many Websites Can A Server Support?

This is a great question and one that I think deserves an answer. However, that answer isn’t going to be really straightforward as there are several variables that can change. But the way the modern website is set up and with today’s high-performance CPUs and large amounts of RAM, there isn’t anything on the technical side of the world that is stopping you from hosting 1 million or more sites on a web server. But that isn’t very realistic or practical.

Each website will share a slide of the CPU power and a slice of the RAM and a slide of the input/output on the server, so if you had 1 million websites, that slice would be so tiny that the website just simply would not work and eventually your server will figuratively start to cry and stop working.

Many budget web hosts, can and do host a thousand or more low-traffic websites on one server at one time. Notice I said low traffic. If the website isn’t getting much traffic, that it really isn’t requiring that slice of the CPU/Memory and I/O of the server, it is just sitting there waiting for someone to visit. But if you have a more popular website, and one that dynamically generates the content on the fly by using a database, then that website will require more resources from the server. And none of this so far has even talked about the network and how much bandwidth each website is consuming.

So to actually answer your question, we would need to know all those factors, such as the size of the website, the amount of traffic it generates is it HTML or using a Content Management System (CMS), like WordPress. We would also need to know how many CPU’s the server has, how many cores each CPU has, and what is the speed of the CPUs. We would also need to know the amount and type of RAM, the types of I/O, and what type of disks the server is using. We would also need to know what type of Network Interface Controllers (NICs) are on the server and why type of connection they have to each of those NICs.

Our servers never have more than 200 websites hosted on them at any one time, and if any of those websites are high-traffic websites, then we will move them from the server and place them on their own server or a server with only a couple of high traffic websites. We never overuse our servers by stuffing as many websites as possible on them, as many other website hosts do.

Call Simply Web Services today (540-479-6350) for your website hosting needs.