A dynamic request is a request that was not served by any cache, and therefore reaches the origin webserver (Apache). In other words, all requests that are served from a cache, including our own Nginx cache and Cloudflare edge cache, do not count as a dynamic request.
All our plans come with a set amount of Dynamic Requests included. The usage of dynamic requests is measured by counting the number of requests that reach Apache. Dynamic requests will also includes all requests that cannot be cached in the first place, like POST requests. Typical examples of POST requests are ajax and API requests.
When a Bolt environment (your website) is configured correctly, most page views will be delivered from a cache and are therefore not counted as dynamic requests.
How do I know how many Dynamic Requests I need?
To get a rough estimate, for most regular sites, you can use the Google Analytics monthly page view number and divide it by 4 (~80% cache hit rate).
If you know your site’s cache hit rate, multiply your number of page views by 1 – your cache hit rate (the example for an 80% cache hit rate is 1 – 0.8 = 0.2 dynamic request rate) to get an estimated amount of dynamic requests needed.
All our plans come with a fixed number dynamic requests included. We count Dynamic Requests by counting requests made to all the sites on the Bolt, that are not a request to static assets like CSS, JavaScript or images. We do include requests to API endpoints, AJAX endpoints and similar.
Frequently Asked Questions about Dynamic Requests
If you use a cache in front of our servers we do not count dynamic requests that hit cache. We only count requests that hit our server. So if you use a cache feature like Cloudflare APO, all requests that is served from Cloudflare’s cache is not counted.
For Google Analytics (GA) – and most other analytics tools – to count a pageview, the client/visitor/requestor needs to run the Google Analytics JavaScript on the page they are requesting. The GA JavaScript doesn’t run in many situations. For instance when:
– The request is an API request
– The browser is blocking the JavaScript
– The site doesn’t run the JavaScript because consent is not given (GDPR)
– The JavaScript isn’t present on the page
– The request is coming from some sort of bot (i.e Semrush, Ahrefs) that doesn’t run the Google Analytics JavaScript snippet
There may be more reasons Google Analytics can’t measure all hits, but these are the most common ones.
Cloudflare’s analytics information will be in most cases a more accurate portrayal of actual traffic being processed by your site. It’s still not the same, but those numbers match our calculation more accurately.
Page views are just that, a view of someone watching a particular page. It’s counting the number of views of the HTML being rendered for a specific page by your browser. A URL if you will.
Our dynamic requests is about the number of assets such a particular HTML page needs to present itself as you site has defined them. That means that all the assets that are required to generate that HTML page counts as a dynamic request. And that’s not even counting AJAX implementations such as add to cart or certain search solutions or API, feed or commenting. All those require some sort of dynamic process on the server and counts towards the total.
