Benchmarks
Enterprise throughput. Commodity hardware.
The cost-efficiency story
Four and five figures a month: that’s what enterprise WordPress platforms (WordPress VIP, WP Engine, and friends) bill for traffic Pete Panel serves from a plain $48 VPS. The difference is the model: they price by traffic, Pete Panel prices by hardware, and the hardware is cheap. Same WooCommerce store, same traffic, a very different bill. Pick a machine size and see the numbers.
- Billed by visits: the bill climbs with every million
- Traffic spikes turn into overage line items
- Pricing behind a sales call, annual contracts
- Platform lock-in: their stack, their rules
- Flat hardware cost: traffic spikes cost $0 extra
- Redis object cache + OPcache + page caching included
- ModSecurity WAF and SSL included
- Your server, any provider: leave whenever you like
The 8GB tier is measured, not estimated: cached-visit throughput was validated at the claimed rate with k6 (167 requests a second, p95 of 362ms) and checkout capacity was measured with real orders (about 99 a minute at 99% completion). Larger tiers are extrapolated from those results; reproduce any of it with /run_benchmark. VPS prices are Akamai (Linode) shared-CPU list prices; enterprise pricing as publicly reported; your quote may vary.
8GB RAM · 4 vCPU · SSD
Starter tier · Linode 8 GB · WooCommerce-ready
The smallest machine we recommend for a production WooCommerce store, and it’s still wildly overqualified. At Akamai’s list price of $48 a month, Pete Panel’s caching stack turns this starter VPS into a store that shrugs off hundreds of millions of cached visits.
16GB RAM · 4 vCPU · SSD
Entry tier · Linode 16 GB · WooCommerce-ready
Double the memory for bigger catalogs and heavier plugins, at Akamai’s $96-a-month list price (with 6 shared vCPUs; our estimates assume just 4). With full-page caching in front of WooCommerce, this modest machine absorbs traffic that traffic-priced enterprise plans would bill thousands for.
32GB RAM · 8 vCPU · SSD
Growth tier · Linode 32 GB · built for sales seasons
Eight cores, 32GB of memory, and roughly double the throughput across the board; checkout rate scales even better. This is the tier for stores that live through Black Friday every quarter, at Akamai’s $192-a-month list price, still less than a tenth of an entry enterprise plan.
960GB RAM · 48 vCPU · SSD
Enterprise tier · dedicated iron · billions of visits
Dedicated big iron: for scale, Akamai’s largest shared instance (192GB · 32 vCPUs) lists at $1,152 a month, and machines in this class run a few thousand. That buys the kind of numbers that usually come with a sales call and a seven-figure annual contract: two to three million concurrent users and twelve thousand checkouts a minute, on hardware you control end to end.
Frequently asked questions
How many cached visits can a $48 VPS handle with WordPress?
On Pete Panel’s optimized stack, the Linode 8GB at $48 a month is rated at 216 to 432 million cached visits a month. The server-side request rate behind the top figure, 167 requests a second, was validated with k6 against a live staging store.
How were these numbers measured?
With the public /run_benchmark workflow, built on k6. Cached-visit throughput was validated at the claimed rate; the load generator’s bandwidth, not the server, capped full-page tests. Checkout capacity was measured with real WooCommerce orders: about 99 completed orders a minute sustained at 99% completion on the 8GB tier. Larger tiers are extrapolated from those measured results.
Do traffic spikes cost extra?
No. Pete Panel runs on a server you rent at a flat monthly price, so a traffic spike costs $0 extra. Traffic-priced enterprise hosting bills climb with every million visits.
Can I verify these benchmarks myself?
Yes: run /run_benchmark against your own Pete Panel server. It detects your hardware tier, runs the k6 cached-visits test, and reports a claimed-versus-measured PASS/FAIL table.
Ready to see these numbers on your store?
Spin up Pete Panel on the tier that fits your traffic and put the benchmarks to the test: no traffic-based pricing, no surprises. The playground where Claude builds is free; these are the servers where its work ships.