How much resources a website consumes?

[vans]

Hey there!
As said in my presentation topic, I was in here to get some kind of help because I'm about to start a forum project, which is under development, and I would like to understand how much it consumes when a certain number of traffic is visiting my forum/website and when content is published.

As of now, I have an hosting, located in Spain, which offers me:

· 25 HD Disk.
· Unlimited traffic
· Up to 800 MB RAM.
· 25 MySQL database (1GB each one)

It also includes a free domain, and I've only paid €6.99, as I have an offer for 12 free-months.
However, this is not really to discuss whether if my hosting is good, or if you recommend me other.
----

So, of course, as I did not open the forum, and I'm alone doing tests, the website goes really fast.
My understanding is that obviuosly, when time passes and I get more traffic, and more content, I will have to upgrade.
So, my question is:

How do I know exactly my needs?

Is there any rule that says: When you reach xx users per day online, or when you have xx data used, you have to go for certain RAM, or whatever.
How do I know that I should upgrade to a VPS, and the power of the VPS?

I do not need now to get a suggestion of a site who provides hosting/vps/servers, just need to understand how can I feed the technical needs of my forum, for a near future.

Thank you,
vans

 

[Jason76]

From what I researched online - it seems like increased traffic would justify something more than shared - since bandwidth on a VPS is only limited by your allocated bandwidth, not the behavior of other users, for the most part.

 

[awebnerd]

Assuming you are using Linux, keep an eye on your system load averages. You can get them using the "uptime" command. It will look something like this:

load average: 1.05, 0.70, 5.09

Those are the average load over the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes respectively. A load of 1 means 100% load, anything over means that instructions to the processor are having to be cached and wait to be processed.

You can also use a tool like top (I prefer htop) to get an idea of how your system is feeling and what is working the CPU the hardest and what's eating RAM.

Outside of additional monitoring tools, and just getting a feel for your site and noticing when it starts to feel sluggish there isn't much more you can do.

One additional thing you can do, if you use Google Analytics, is to watch the page load times that they record. As long as those are staying down for your users, there is nothing to worry about. At what point you can call it too slow is an administrators decision.

Let me know if this wasn't clear or what you are looking for. I would be happy to help any way I can. If you need help with your Linux box feel free to drop by forum.hackr.pl to get some help =D