The Answer Is Subjective To The Individual.
Bandwidth limitations and Random Access Memory (RAM) thresholds exist when you’re using a hosting provider. The more “common” or “communal” the option, the more issues you’re going to have.
Essentially, if you’re using a shared hosting option, they have to sort of meter your online speed. This, for most businesses that aren’t very large yet, will be fine up to about a thousand daily visitors. Get higher than that, and you need to find a more in-depth solution.
Ideally, whoever your hosting provider is should be operating from solid-state drives incorporating higher RAM and bandwidth thresholds.
In order to determine how much digital horsepower you need, you’ll have to examine site traffic. Many businesses start out with a shared option, and as they graduate into higher areas of traffic, they “level up”, as it were.
Once you hit a certain threshold, there will be a decision to be made as to whether you should incorporate cloud hosting options of a private variety, or run your own server array on-site.
Now, you’d have to get to a pretty high degree of economic congregation online for you to be at this level of consideration. Amazon cloud services incorporate over a million servers.
Weighing Benefits And Costs Of On-Premises Options
A cost-effective and marginally reliable server is going to be around $1k (options around $500 might do for a micro business, but be careful). Unless your online traffic is generating more than a billion dollars through regular operations almost on a daily basis, you’re probably not going to need an operation quite that big.
Accordingly, you’ll be better positioned to consider virtual private options through providers. Instead of shared hosting or running your own expensive array on-site with the inclusion of on-site personnel who are more expensive than the equipment itself, there is a happy medium. You can simply explore private virtual server options.
That is: you’re “renting” space from a hosting provider in a digital sense; but you’re not sharing it with other businesses. Shared hosting plans divvy up resources. But dedicated servers don’t.
Expanding Hosting To Match Traffic
At that point, you simply increase what you’re paying for hosting as your traffic needs expand, allowing you to organically scale out as you need to in accordance with what makes the most sense for your business overall. There are also choices in the middle between a single dedicated server, and shared virtual options.
Essentially, you’re sort of “half sharing” the space for a middling fee. You get priority. It’s not quite as good as going with a dedicated option, but this route will get the job done.
All that to say this: with high ram, high bandwidth, and no users with whom you’re sharing hosting options, websites move a lot quicker, and can handle more traffic.
You’re likely never going to get a billion people a day even if you’re a AAA, top-of-the-line company; there are only eight billion people on the planet! So the truth is, there are limits to what you need.
Google gets about 5.6 billion searches a day. In September of 2020, Amazon saw a little under 2.5 billion searches. There’s a little contrast, here, right? These are numbers the “big guys” are working with.
Determining Which Options Best Fit Your Business
A corporation with 1,000 employees averaging $40k a year per employee has to pull in $40,000,000 just to cover personnel, before benefits and insurance. A company with a hundred employees at $40k a year has to pay $4,000,000 before those costs.
Profit has to be higher than operational overhead as pertains to employee salaries, and at a substantial enough level for things like expansion, R&D, troubleshooting, marketing, and PR to be covered without impacting growth. So your technology overhead can’t be keeping pace with those sorts of numbers unless you’ve got enough profit to spare.
The bottom line? Start small with a shared option, graduating to a dedicated server, and upgrading from there if necessary. The more bandwidth, RAM, and dedicated hosting options you have, the faster your website runs, and the better customers feel about your business. Balance hosting costs with site needs so you don’t get ahead of yourself.
