By Coupon Code Swap on

I'm working on a Drupal site I hope to have released in a month or so. I know that it will eventually outgrow shared hosting but can't afford a dedicated server at this time. I've researched some inexpensive alternatives to dedicated hosting.

Does anybody have a heavily trafficked Drupal site currently up and running on the Media Temple Grid Server? If so, some numbers in terms of daily visitors, database queries on specific pages and some other details such as installed modules would be very helpful as a benchmark.

In fact, it would be interesting to get this kind of benchmarking for a variety of reputable hosting companies. Perhaps people who have busy Drupal sites and are not using dedicated servers could post a link to the site so people can actually see how long it takes for pages to load, along with some stats:

  1. Number of Daily visitors on average.
  2. Modules installed.
  3. Number of Database queries on a couple of popular pages
  4. If traffic spikes have taken the site offline etc.

I think this would be useful to gauge what is possible and get a better feel for which hosting providers perform well. Or is it even possible to run a semi-complex Drupal site that isn't hosted on a dedicated server?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

Have you considered a VPS?

Shared hosting is just too restrictive for sites that need tuning and customization.

A better alternative is a VPS. Get one that runs on Xen with say 128MB or RAM. This is by far more cost efficient than a real dedicated server, yet far more flexible and customizable.

The downside is that you need to be proficient in Linux administration or have someone do that part for you.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

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Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

Coupon Code Swap’s picture

Coupon Code Swap commented

I just had a Joomla site that is on shared hosting get shut down today by my hosting provider. I don't think there were more than 50 people online, but it also has Gallery2 and SMF bridged and that makes the site kind of heavy. Over 20% CPU usage.

I am hoping to find somebody who has successfully optimized Drupal so that it can handle around 100-300 simultaneous users on a shared hosting account. But, maybe this is not possible. I'm also wondering how many simultaneous users one could expect to have on a Drupal site with relatively few third party modules installed. Of course a lot depends on which modules are used.

So many factors to consider and when you are operating on an extremely tight budget, it is necessary to have some foresight.

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kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

You said "can handle around 100-300 simultaneous users". But what are these users doing? Are they just reading content? Commenting on it? Creating new content?

Also you said: "a lot depends on which modules are used". That is another key issue here. No two sites are alike. Not only in what modules are installed, but what access pattern there is, volume, ...etc. Therefore no one can say that your site will be fine or not.

Your best bet is to benchmark a copy of your own site with the load you expect. However, this is an expensive exercise and not easy to simulate what the shared hosting environment will have.
--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

inforeto’s picture

inforeto commented

Some research must be done with the hosting company to know the global configurations.
These are likely to be already optimized to match its shared resources.
However, some things must be double checked, like having mysql query cache turned on,
or apache keepalivetimeout lower than the default values, etc.
These things cause bottlenecks and spikes that does not readily appear when examining site traffic.

cartika’s picture

cartika commented

Does anybody have a heavily trafficked Drupal site currently up and running on the Media Temple Grid Server?

Do a quick search over at webhostingtalk.com about this. MT is really not a good replacemet for a dedicated server - and especially not with dynamic sites.

Honestly, you cannot replace a dedicated server with a shared hosting account - however, what you can do is choose an environment that allows you the most CPU and Memory per user - and the only way to achieve this is not to purchase these massive shared hosting accouts - as regardless of marketing promises, the larger these accounts are, the less CPU you can inherently have available to you.

Our recent experience with Drupal during a digg.com listing has indicated that Drupal is even a little heavier then some of the other CMS scripts - however, with some server tweaking and optimization specific for Drupal you can certainly accomodate 50+ simultaneous users in a proper shared hosting environment. Expect to pay in the $1/GB of transfer for proper, reliable, application hosting where you will actually be able to utilize what you have purchased before hitting CPU limitations.

www.cartikahosting.com
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