How many daily visitors can shared hosting actually handle?

Generally speaking I think you should just concentrate more on getting more traffic to your site rather than considering how much your hosting can handle.

Once you experience some loading slows from your site due to too many simultaneous visitors or your host starts to throttle your traffic then you might consider upgrading to dedicated or whatever else floats your boat depending on what your host can offer.

This used to be a concern for me back in 2009 - 10 when i first starting getting serious with my sites...but then i realized there's no remote need to know what the next step is until i get there.

In most cases you're talking about several thousand visitors hitting your site daily to push any tangible limits on your host. This is also assuming that your site loads efficiently such that individual pages aren't eating up server resources.

So there are a lot of factors that affect this but you shouldn't really concern yourself with it until you have a crap load of traffic hitting your sites (concentrate on that traffic )

It's not the actual amount, it's how the server is used.
Shared hosting can handle 100k+ a day on funnyplanet wordpress theme
Or about 10k if a theme is heavy

Traffic handling s not a major concern as large companies like hostgator are prepared for this possible problem. Concentrate on traffic building and see it yourself.

it depends on what type of content also,
so you have to consider hosting videos and large files in a cloud account like Google Drive.
good luck.

What also matters is how the traffic is spread out during the day.

If you get all your traffic in a couple of hours then it can crash your server, if it's more spread out the risk is less. (not that you can do anyhting about that though...)

It depends on the size and requirements of your website. It is also vary in hosting companies.

Unless you have a product launch coming up or something similar, shared hosting shouldn't be an issue. I don't think there is an actual figure about the number of visitors. How much data is being downloaded also plays a part.

I think what he's looking for is a ballpark number.

I had experienced a server crashed from traffic before and here's what I had at that time:

Hosting: Shared- Hostgator
CMS: Wordpress
Theme: optimizepress
Plugins: 18 - 20
Traffic: 4000+ from social media (twitter and google plus)
What they're doing: Just reading a blog post and an email opt in at the end of the blog post (i don't know if opting in will slow your servers down though)
Result: Crashed.

Now I'm not sure if those are the numbers you're looking for but that's just to give you an idea.

On the contrary, you don't send traffic and see if your site holds. Better prepare for the worst because wasted traffic is money going down the drain.

My highest traffic site is on shared hosting and it receives 16,000 to 18,000 daily pageviews. But I host all images on Amazon S3 server. If I had all images with hosting the site would be toast.

If you expect huge traffic use Amazon for media and you should be okay. If you're concerned check out something with more horsepower such VPS. I'd hold off dedicated for now because that's fairly expensive.

I've spoken to several host companies and their rates are no better than Amazon S3 for data transfer, so that's the set up I stick with.