Fast delivery webpages on shared hosting

Question 1

To be honest there's not much you can do on shared hosting. There's a reason why they are cheap ... they limit you to do stuff like you want to do.

Either you move to a VPS that allow memcache (which are cheaper) and you put some google ads OR you keep going on your shared hosting using a pre-generated content system.

VPS can be very cheap (look for coupons) and you can install what ever you want since you are root.

for example hostmysite.com with the coupon: 50OffForLife you pay 20$ per month for life ... vs a 5$ shared hosting ...

If you want to keep the current hosting, then what you can do is this:

Pages are generated by a process (cronjob or on the fly), everytime someone write a comment or make an update. This process start and fetch all the data on the page and saves it to the web page.

So let say you have a page with comments, grab the contents (meta, h1, p, etc..) and the comments and save both into the file.

Example: (using .htaccess - based on your answer you are familiar with this)

/topic/1/

If the file exists, then simply echo ... if not:

select * from pages where page_id = 1;
select * from comments where page_id = 1;
file_put_contents('/my/public_html/topic/1/index.html', $content);

Or something along these lines.

Therefore, saving static HTML will be very fast since you don't have to call any DB. It just loads the file once it's generated.

Question 2

I know I'm stepping on unstable ground providing an answer to this question, but I think it is very indicative.

Pat R Ellery didn't provide enough details to do any kind of assessment, but the good news there can't be enough details. Explanation is quite simple: anybody can build as many mental model as he wants, but real system will always behave a bit differently.

So Pat, do test your system all the time, as much as you can. What you are trying to do is to plan the capacity of your solution.

You need the following:

Capacity test - To determine how many users and/or transactions a given system will support and still meet performance goals.
Stress test - To determine or validate an application’s behavior when it is pushed beyond normal or peak load conditions.
Load test - To verify application behavior under normal and peak load conditions.
Performance test - To determine or validate speed, scalability, and/or stability.

See details here:

In the other words (and a bit primitive): if you want to know your system is capable to handle N requests per time_period simulate N requests per time_period and see the result.

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(image source)

Another example:

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There are a lot of tools available:

See list here