How many visitors can view my site at once?

While we do not limit the number of visitors that can view your website, we do limit the number of visitors who can simultaneously connect to your hosting account. There's a subtle difference there because users only count as "connecting" while they're actively downloading content from your website.

However, as soon as users finish loading a page's content or disconnect from SSH, their connections are freed up for other users. This means if the page a user's connecting to takes .1 seconds to fully load, she only counts as a connection for .1 seconds. After that, she no longer counts toward your total allowed connections — unless she clicks somewhere on your site that establishes another connection.

This means, theoretically, a very large number of visitors could be viewing your website at the same time, as long as they didn't all process the requests simultaneously.

The number of simultaneous connections your hosting account can handle depends on its type (more info).

An Analogy for Simultaneous Visitors

If the page load explanation didn't resonate with you, think about a kitchen. Instead of simultaneously providing data to X numbers of visitors, kitchens can prepare X numbers of meals. As soon as it's done preparing one meal, it can start preparing another. So, the total number of customers they can serve isn't the total number of meals they can make — it's the rate at which they can take on new orders.

Now, relating that back to concurrent connections: your connection limit isn't the total number of visitors that can be on your site. It's simply the number of visitors it can deliver/serve data to simultaneously.

Calculating Total Visitors

Based on the number of concurrent connections your account has, you can calculate how many visitors per minute you can serve if you know your sites average load time. Below are some example calculations: