DigitalOcean $5/month: How many visitors per day for My website?

There are two things worth considering here for $5/month plan

1. The 1TB bandwidth or 1024gb bandwidth.
2. Your RAM and processor.
3. Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer between your host and your user's browser Suppose you get 10k visit per day and each visitor visits one page then you got 10k page views,

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Suppose your average page size is let's say 1 MB, then the amount of data transferred is around 10,000 × 1 = 10,000 MB per day, for 30 days it'll be around 300k MB or 300GB. You still have around 700GB of bandwidth left on your monthly bandwidth quota.

3. You have 1GB RAM and 1 core processor. These are good, for 10k traffic, also if you have too many websites running on a single droplet, then your site might be slow and it could be a bad user experience.

Set up two $5 instances over at DigitalOcean Cloud computing designed for developers. when I installed their 1-click app of the LEMP stack, with Linux, NGINX, MySQL and PHP. Then I downloaded the latest version of WordPress and installed that.

Then on the other, I installed Siege

Then I pointed to 100 concurrent users at the front page of the WordPress installation, which of course uses PHP and MySQL. This I ran for 60 seconds.

• Transactions: 2680 hits 
• Availability: 100.00 % 
• Elapsed time: 59.39 secs 
• Data transferred: 50.96 MB 
• Response time: 1.66 secs 
• Transaction rate: 45.13 trans/sec 
• Throughput: 0.86 MB/sec 
• Concurrency: 75.01 
• Successful transactions: 2680 
• Failed transactions: 0 
• Longest transaction: 2.51 
• Shortest transaction: 0.09 

So in these 60 seconds, I get 45 transactions per second. Not a single transaction failed out of the 2680 hits to the front page. So that’s 3,888,000 hits per 24 hours. Of course, a bigger site will be “heavier” and have lots of static files too. Note that this is before there’s any database saving caching applied to the installation.

As example on how much the server can serve, if it’s only a static file, here’s requesting a css file of 80Kb (as opposed to the 50Kb of the php page response). Same 60 seconds and 100 users

• Transactions: 11737 hits 
• Availability: 100.00 % 
• Elapsed time: 59.40 secs 
• Data transferred: 924.39 MB 
• Response time: 0.01 secs 
• Transaction rate: 197.59 trans/sec 
• Throughput: 15.56 MB/sec 
• Concurrency: 1.22 
• Successful transactions: 11737 
• Failed transactions: 0 
• Longest transaction: 1.00 
• Shortest transaction: 0.00 

11737 hits in a minute. Pretty cool.

So yes, there’s plenty of room to serve 10,000 visitors a day on a $5 server from DigitalOcean. Signing up with that link will give you $100 credit, which is enough to have a server like $50  server like the one above, for 2 full months for free.