Discussions about web hosts go here (thread split from the general chat).

About what type of server should I rent for roughly 1k users with moderate dynamic stuff and a little SQL (i.e. a website with the only mail load being login confirmation and the occasional newsletter and facebook-superlight type of functionality i.e. you have a "personal" site), nothing high load or superintense though. 1k is the upper edge anyways so I feel like I don't need anything too beefy.

On a related note, does anyone in here have experience renting cloud/grid type of setups that charge you for the CPU etc. that you actually use? Seems pretty good and scalable from a first readthrough.

Edit: Debian stable, postgres, probably lighttpd and one of Django/Pyramid/Rails (probably Django)

any of a million shared hosting companies will be more than enough for that, for 5-10 bucks a month.

i've been using webfaction and i like it pretty well, they explicitly support django fwiw. but i'm sure there are a ton of other options that are just as good.

We've been researching cloud based apps for awhile now and the only reservation we have still is how to get off the cloud if you need to. The cloud providers all give you easy ways to deploy, setup and migrate to the cloud but it's pretty much an unknown on how to get your data off if you ever needed to do so.

From what I've read some cloud providers "allow" you to do regular off-cloud backups so you could get your stuff out with any migration strategy. Won't be automated but I'm sure it's not that hard for any decent sysadmin

Oh lol, thx. What kind of scenarios would you say require a dedicated server or some v-servers or whatnot i.e. beefier than the cheapo shared stuff?
I really lack an understandind for these kind of numbers, maybe I should get an admin job somewhere to brush up on a general understanding of the dimensions lol

Also I found this mildly amusing (from slashdot):

You can't really just say "if you get 30,000 hits a month you need a dedicated host" because it depends on what you're serving. Web scaling is pretty case dependent. If you've optimized all that you can and it's still slow then it's time to scale.

Bluehost.com isn't too bad. I've used them on a few sites and they do support Django although it's only through fcgi. You have to set it up yourself though. I never tried Pyramid with them but I assume it works since you have rights to install Python frameworks/libs.

The only annoying thing is you need to send them a picture of your driver's license (or photo ID) to get SSH access. They run a standard cpanel and CentOS.

Gaming mouse is right though, find a decent shared host (not a total junk one) and you should be fine. It's always easier to upgrade with your host than downgrade as well.

Depends on how essential uptime is to if you need to go cloud/dedicated. When I ran my SMS site 100% (or as close to) uptime as possible was essential so I got one. Shared can statistically be 99.999% uptime depending on how they measure it, but quality of service is generally worse, for the average visitor this is no big deal but if you are hosting something that requires fast and reliable serving then it's time to go dedicated.

The middle step is virtual dedicated which is like a much higher quality shared.

i'm no expert but i have a decent amount of personal experience. basically, most shared hosts at major companies can handle quite a bit of traffic. as shoe lace said there is no magic number but 1K is way, way below whatever the number would be.

in like 5 or so years of hosting the only major shared host problem i had was someone else on the host got hit by a dos attack, and it took down our site for like a day. i've had some other small outage type things just cause by server issues, etc (ie, 99.9% up time is never true).

so i think the decision of how much money to spend is generally more a function of how much support you need and how fast rather than how many hits you are getting, which for most sites will simply never be a consideration. if the cost of the rare event outage is really high for your business, then it might make sense to pay extra for more protection against that.

i use site5 for $9/month for shared hosting. works perfectly. i get about 10k hits/month for all my sites. not much but they never complain and say i have plenty of legroom

Virtual box is pretty cool. With Gentoo running inside of it, it only uses 75mb of RAM and barely uses any CPU time. I thought it would be much more resource intensive.

it uses how-ever-much memory you have mapped to the OS. So running a Gentoo with 2gb of memory will automatically take up 2gb of your system memory when the virtual machine boots.

as far as hosting look into cheap vps providers. generally that option is going to be better than shared hosting.


really cheap

you pick your memory/cpu/hd space/bandwidth - adding more memory/cpu is as simple as contacting support.

root access. change/install/update whatever you want.

I gave it 512mb of RAM but it seems to only use what it needs to use.

I haven't looked for hosts for a while, and am a bit out the loop with server hardware etc, a company I know has offered me a special deal on virtual dedicated server (the good thing about these guys is the support is superb).

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (64 bit)
80GB HDD
2 cpus
2GB dedicated ram
300gb bandwidth
2 IP's
Max 8 virtual servers per server
Intel Quad-Core Xeon Processors with Hyper-Threading (8 Logical Cores)
Solid State Harddrives (Hardware Node)
Hot-swap RAID 10 SAN Storage
RAID Hard-Drive Mirroring with Hot-Swap Disks

This is for £55 a month, which is the top of my budget, is this considered competitive nowadays? It meets all my technical requirements. I'm not expecting the site to use much resources initially (it gets around 350,000 page views a month currently, but looking to grow this rapidly to 1m-1.5m a month) but I want it to be extremely reliable, fast and available.

that's a VPS, right? just unusual wording "Virtual dedicated server"

The bandwidth seems perhaps low (I got 500gb/mo on my hostgator reseller account @ $25/mo) - but I have no idea if even 300gb is a stupid high amount no-one will ever use for a non-video streaming site or anything.

2GB RAM seems low (even for a desktop lol), maybe it's not necessary? or perhaps it can "burst" much more on-demand. My hostgator has 12GB RAM and 16 cores (32 logical) - but then this is shared with an undetermined number of other reseller accounts I would think. I can tell you as of now it's not using any swap and ~20% RAM, but it's not busy.

Also Windows, but I assume you have good reason for this.

eta: obv a VPS is much more customisable than a reseller account, but they're not set in stone. If the main purpose will be for serving a normal website, that customisation may be unnecessary, and self-managed may be a hindrance. not sure about the last part either.

The 2GB ram is dedicated to my website afaik, ram is surprisingly expensive on hosts I asked about it here:

http://superuser.com/questions/26191...-so-little-ram

From what I've been told, decent ram costs more, and as well as that each server might only have 8 ram slots, divided by 8 sites means each site gets 1 dedicated slot each and there's probably a reason they picked 2gb in each one.

I've shopped around a bit and 2GB for this price range is actually pretty good.

Has to be windows because it's ASP.net/SQL server. 300gb is more than enough at the moment, but it is a concern. The current site uses ~30gb/month afaik, and we want space for 10 fold growth, but the new site is written miles better and each page gzipped is only 8kb or so.

We need remote desktop hence main reason for virtual, it needs a lot of IIS customisations and total control over caching and other things like that.

Shared would probably suffice to some degree but we really don't want the headache of moving the site again for the benefit of saving a couple of hundred £.

This site has a dedicated for £50 p/m:

https://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/....nav.dedicated

4gb ram, 2 cpus, unlimited traffic (ugh I hate that) but the support is non existent from speaking to people who have tried them before.

I have used slicehost in the past and they have been pretty good (vps).

They are Linux only by the looks of it, and ram is even more expensive I really should have 2gb minimum because it's running SQL server (express ) as well.

Bandwidth has to be high quality as well because we will be hosting a popular ~10mb-20mb download (target is 500 downloads per day) ugh which makes 300gb soak up pretty quickly especially because we will be supporting a software auto updater which could use up dozens of gb in a few hours. Were considering hosting those downloads on a cloud files site.

Yeah it's a pain, the current software version is open source and is downloaded 500-700 times daily at 15mb a time, which is ~250gb a month, we are expecting this version which we want to host on our own site to be even more popular so idk really what to do.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud...files/pricing/

This is 18c /gb, anyone used it before? 300gb = $50/m which is really pushing the budget, but from our POV the more downloads the better really as lots of them will convert into sales (hopefully).

Ah, windows only. Not sure which the best windows providers are, but as far as downloads go, I would strongly recommend looking at Amazon S3. I am guessing that downloads of static files will be the biggest use of bandwidth, so using Amazon S3 would mean you would only pay for the bandwidth you used (at around 6-7p/GB) and would also provide you with a really reliable service.

You can estimate your costs using the AWS calculator http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Thanks, calc doesn't work for me, but at 7p a month it's around £25 a month for 300gb which is fine. I suppose hosting downloads separately is better than on the site server because Amazon can handle bursts of downloads well.

Yes, it would mean a sudden burst of downloads would not bring your site down. It might also allow you to downgrade your server requirements slightly, as the server would no longer need to handle the downloads.

It might not be the cheapest option, but I would certainly consider it.

Not sure why the calculator isnt working for you but I put in 300GB of downloads and it comes to $40.

Fwiw, irt scaling, Ive been running a bunch of request tests against a couple different setups, and by far the best performing one for me has been ubuntu, php5-cgi pecl-apc, and enabling fastcgi for lighttpd, optimization of the stack may be something worth considering before you upgrade hardware/plans

Hostgator is a nice cheap host that makes it easy for me to experiment. I like their support too.