Will it scale? Designing websites for high volume usage is an absolute must if you want to create a website destination designed for a million plus page views per month. Perhaps the biggest thing to consider is whether or not you’re ready for a sudden spike in website growth. Loosely translated, if you’re still using shared hosting and expect to maintain a stable experience for your website visitors, you’re in for a real surprise. It’s not going to work for long.
The best way to create a website that is going to scale well into the future is to look to a VPS (virtual private server) that offers many of the same features as a true dedicated server would. The biggest advantage of course, is the ability to expand on available resources easily and often without any website downtime. So for example, if you needed to add additional RAM to your VPS, the web host can provide this to you quite easily. More RAM translates into a server that can handle more traffic.
Next to a VPS, my second choice is going to be a dedicated server. While it cannot be expanded upon without downtime like the VPS, you’re going to find that you will it runs much smoother than shared hosting and without nearly as much downtime.