How much traffic can Netlify handle?
Thinking about using Netlify to host a product I am launching this month. Has anyone used Netlify for hosting a project that had a good amount of traffic and pageviews?
Product is a simply HTML javascript calculator.
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Netlify offers 100GB/month on the free plan and up to 1TB/month on paid plans (those are soft limits).
A simple HTML/JS calculator shouldn't consume more than 1MB of code, if we add a few images to the site that could be around 5MB (pretty big for a calculator). So that should be enough for at least 20,000 visitors per month on the free plan. Why visitors and not pageviews? Because Netlify heavily caches content on the client side by default, and which makes them save a lot of bandwidth.
I don't think Cloudflare is necessary if you use Netlify, as they deploy their own powerful CDN.
Thanks! I am going to run with it then.
Their pricing page says 100GB/month on the free plan. Toss CloudFlare's CDN in front of it, and you're probably able to get pretty far.
Rookie q, how would you put a CloudFlare CDN in front of it? Is that something from inside Netlify or would that be just through CloudFlare?
All done at the DNS level (assuming you're using CloudFlare for your DNS of the domain this may be hosted on). As long as the CNAME / A record is configured to proxy through CloudFlare, and you have caching enabled, CloudFlare will do the rest of the work.
A site I run saved 100GB of bandwidth in the last month without any additional configuration or anything.
wow. Awesome thank you!
It depends on how much data you transfer, so good if you can roughly gauge ahead of time. I've used them for a high traffic event and did need an enterprise plan to keep things running smoothly at a few millions visitors a day. They were very flexible and allowed us to do a short contract, I think was like 2 months.
Millions of visitors a day? 😲If I get that much traffic I will be overjoyed. Thanks for the tip!
Netlify uses really fast CDN so Cloudflare isn't necessary. If you want to cut your bandwidth down that's a different story. You can be a bit tricky here. Use Cloudflare or use another static site provider for your images like e.g. Zeit and serve them from the subdomain.
But I would rather make the site pages thicker and server everything from Netlify. I like to make pages to be tiny so bellow 500KB. 5MB page is too big in my opinion. But it really depends...
Static sites are way easier to run in production than dynamic, database-backed websites. Static site hosts like Netlify can handle a good amount of traffic and some more pretty easily.
Two performance tips:
Make sure you enable asset optimization. They will bundle and minify your CSS/JS files, compress your images, and serve it through their CDN.
If you're going to use an external DNS service for your apex domain, make sure they support ALIAS/ANAME records or a CNAME flattening. If you're using Netlify's own DNS service or serving your website solely from a subdomain (e.g. www), then you don't have to worry about it.