I’m helping a friend with a website for an NGO animal rights group they are starting. They are hoping to embed a live stream on a free-tier netlify instance for an upcoming event.
I’m wondering whether a free-tier netlify instance could handle 5k - 10k site visitors in a 10 minute period? The site is very lightweight. Note, Right now the site is just sign-up forms. The embeded video will be added for the event is an embedded live stream.
My understanding is that the free-tier has 100gb of bandwidth per month. My calculation is that each visit will be no more than 1.5mbs of bandwidth. So, 5k-10k site visits will sit under the monthly allowance of bandwidth (About <=15gbs of bandwidth). I’m wondering if having a spike of visitors in a 10 minute period will crash or slow the site significantly?
Has anyone had experience with managing an expected spike in visitors on a free-tier Netlify instance? Are there have any recommendations for load-testing?
For those who are asking the same thing in the future -
Hi Tim,
Yup, that scale doesn’t sound too problematic. The main thing you should be aware of on the free tier is how many functions you run, since that is most likely to blow through your quota if you have a next.js backed site, since that is most likely to generate unexpected costs. This does not seem to be your use case
Load testing is not permitted in our Terms of Service, but you shouldn’t need it; our CDN regularly serves several hundred thousand assets every second, so your 10k visitors would probably be ok even if they all arrived at the same second, though we know this is unlikely unless you are launching some kind of cryptocurrency and have extremely abusive users (as nearly all such sites do, the people trying to be first in line tend to send attack-levels of traffic. But this doesn’t sound like your use case, as well!
