Self-hosted split testing? A $6 server is enough for 99.99% of websites.
Worried that self-hosted split testing is going to crash your server and destroy your website performance? We get it. We pressure-tested three of our own until they couldn’t handle it anymore, tracking every visit, conversion, heatmap click and session replay. This is what we found, and when you should stop and go to the cloud.
| Server | Price | Handled | Broke at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared, 1 vCPU, 1 GB | $6/month | 40 page views a second | 60 |
| Shared, 2 vCPU, 4 GB | $24/month | 80 page views a second | 120 |
| Dedicated, 2 vCPU, 4 GB | $42/month | 120 page views a second | 160 |
What that means for you
Check your analytics. If your site gets this many page views a year or fewer, it’ll run great on this server:
| Page views a year | Server | How big is that? |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 120 million (10 million a month) | $6/month | Bigger than 99.99% of websites. Only about 16,000 sites in the world get more. |
| Up to 240 million (20 million a month) | $24/month | Only about 8,500 sites get more. |
| Up to 370 million (30 million a month) | $42/month dedicated | Only about 5,500 sites get more. |
In other words: unless you’re one of the 16,000 biggest sites on the planet, a $6 server can track your split tests.
That already leaves room for your busiest hour to hit 10× your average, and it includes heatmaps and session replay on every visit. It assumes the server only does tracking, with your website hosted somewhere else.
When to go to the cloud
Self-hosting makes sense for most sites. Switch to AB Split Test Cloud if any of these apply to you:
- You don’t want to run a server. No updates, backups or 3am outages. Add one script tag and the tracking runs on Cloudflare, close to your visitors.
- Your site and tracking would share one server. These numbers assume tracking has a server of its own. On cheap shared hosting, a traffic spike hits your site and your tests together.
- Your site isn’t on WordPress. Cloud works anywhere you can add a script tag: Webflow, Framer, Next.js, Astro, Shopify themes or plain HTML.
Cloud is free for your first 100,000 page views. You don’t need a credit card, and the free allowance doesn’t expire.
Next up, we’re testing newer dedicated servers on UpCloud and Vultr.
Want your test data on your own servers? Talk to us about an enterprise licence. We’ll help you pick the server and set it up.