Hi, I’m just getting started on the 14-day free trial, and trying to understand which plan I will need. I have two questions: Just me, creating my site for the first time, and flipping around the various Admin settings, I’ve already run up 250 page views. I got curious and clicked on two different pages, then clicked back to Admin, and it was up by 15 more page views. And I’m the only User! How are these page views calculated? What happens if I run out of page views in mid-month? Is the site frozen in some way?

Here are some docs about page views: Understanding pageviews and the site traffic report We find that most sites stay well within their limits until they hit some level of popularity. If you consistently exceed your limits, we will work with you to find a more appropriate plan, and you also will always have the option to take your data with you and host your site yourself or elsewhere if what we offer on our hosting does not meet your needs.

My only experience with this was during Covid times (otherwise I self-host). I created a site hosted by Discourse quickly in order to create some specific Covid related forum. For some reason I managed to create a click-bait topic. I think we had about 10.000 users looking at it at the same time. I thought this was a problem so I approached Discourse team immediately to ask what that would mean. Their answer was “Don’t worry, we can manage, let’s see how it goes…” So I doubt you get a freeze mid-month… Discourse is all about communication, all the way, down to the last team member. If you would run into a problem, something went terribly wrong.

Hi everyone; thank you for taking the time to reply. Yes, my old site was WordPress, and it had a link to an open-source Simple Machines chat forum, via which - no matter how much security we put on - served as a back door to my website. The only fix was to shut down that Simple Machines site altogether. My site is built on Squarespace now, and I’m trying to understand my options, regarding whether to host my chat forum on Discourse or on that. My question regarding pageviews was raised because I’ve currently got about 3500 followers on FB, and if even only half of them come over to the new Discourse forum, I could easily imagine more than 100k pageviews just from the first day(s).

An update on some changes we’ve made recently to our page view limits: [image]Page views limit too low? Just a note that all self serve plans (Starter, Pro, and Business) now include up to 500K monthly browser page views. The main difference between tiers is now primarily based on which features are available, though different usage limits still apply for things like email and storage.

Newbie trying to understand Pageviews

Product Support

mcwumbly (Dave McClure) August 2, 2025, 11:03pm 8

An update on some changes we’ve made recently to our page view limits:

Topic		Replies	Views
Page views limit too low? Product Support	46	1941	August 4, 2025
What happens when the monthly page views runs out on a forum? Product Support	5	562	September 25, 2023
Pageviews exhausted Product Support	4	369	November 3, 2023
Are web crawler page views included in the monthly 500K page view limit? General free-plan	2	201	February 11, 2026
What are "page views" in Discourse.org hosting? Self-hosting hosting	2	1592	February 10, 2016

Newbie trying to understand Pageviews

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