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By mixersoft on
I'm building a site that can handle up/download of LARGE zip files (JPG photos) and generate preview and thumbnail renderings -- which are most efficiently done in the background. After much effort, I finally got my drupal 5.1 configured properly on site5 (their error, not mine) only to be told that my application is "not appropriate" for their shared hosting service.
When I said that I wanted to process 1000 photos, they said "no persistent connections or background processes", without elaborating on when a connection is "persistent". (How can anyone use 5TB of bandwidth a month without generating any load on the cpus?) They seemed to suggest that a long download or upload could be called persistent process and terminated. In fact, they terminated my initial project checkout in of the drupal directory in subversion because the process took too long!
Regardless, I need some suggestions on what my options are:
-- should I dice up my background processing into lots of short jobs and try to get another shared hosting server to take me
-- am I forced to go to a dedicated server (much more expensive). Which ones?
-- or is there some other option, like Amazons EC2 and S3? (I was already going to go to S3 for photo storage anyways.)
TIA.
Comments
AN Hosting is pretty good but not perfect
An Hosting is $6.95 per month with good (but perhaps not always great) Mysql performance which is key for Drupal
lots of space and data transfer. I host my moderately popular podcast there and I haven't had any issues there for 2 weeks since I signed up with them
Here is my site (new site so not much there) http://geoffhankerson.com
Drawbacks - site was down for 3 hours day after I signed up. And, they have limit http file uploads to 10mb - not the greatest for a podcast - I have to ftp the files
Overall I'm satisfied. VPS Hosting with them starts at $49 per month
AN Hosting
My experience with AN Hosting has been great, so far. I've been there for 5 months now. The outage ghankstef mentioned was the only significant downtime I've had (and 3 hours ain't much, compared to what I experienced at Dreamhost). I have a fairly large photo section on my site, running embedded Gallery2. The performance is speedy, and I've never had any problems doing batch thumbnails jobs (although 1000 pics at once might be a different story..!).
If you go with AN Hosting, ask them to put you on a server with local MySQL, it'll give you better performance. You might want to check out my AN Hosting review here: http://blamcast.net/articles/drupal-hosting
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John Forsythe
CVS was missing, now fixed...
AN Hosting is fast, but if you prefer using "cvs update" to manage your core and module files, they won't provide it on their shared server. *** correction!*** I just notified AN support and they've added the cvs client to the shared server I'm using. It must have been missing by mistake. Very impressed with AN now! Quick support turnaround... great deal! woo hoo!
Shared is horrible
Shared hosting is normally always bad because they overload the servers and oversell the resources. Nothing makes sense with shared unless you are running a low resource consuming site. You should look into a VPS or a dedicated let me know if you need help choosing a VPS provider I'll point you the right way.
(PS: dont use reseller either its basically the same as shared)
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nofollow..?
Is that a sig or an internet directory listing? ;p
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John Forsythe
VPS is the way to go for me
I did some research and it sounds like VPS is for me. Send me your recommendations for the best providers.
From your description a VPS
From your description a VPS would be a better option. They can also be a better option than a cheap dedicated server depending on your needs and your VPS capabilities.
When looking for a VPS hoster, find out the hardware specs for the VPS that you will be running on, your guaranteed minimum CPU share, the guaranteed minimum bandwidth that you will have access to (this will be different than the server's bandwidth), how they meter bandwidth, if it's burstable, and what kind of support is included. You may also want to find out any burstable capabilities, e.g. extra CPU power, RAM, or bandwidth that you may use during short periods of time during periods of heavy activity.
The amount of RAM you buy is probably the most important. It's easy to eat up RAM if you plan on doing a lot of media upload and have an active site.
The setup work is more for a VPS or a dedicated server. You will need to secure and harden your installation and configure more parts of your server. At the same time this is also helpful because it allows you more control over how things work, its easier to optimize your environment and running Drupal is easier when you can change the apache, php and mysql settings yourself.
I would create a list of possible hosters, come up with a standard list of questions that concern you and your particular set up and mail them the questions. Just this step will allow you to start winnowing your list of providers based on responses, response time, etc.
Good Luck!
From your description a VPS
From your description a VPS would be a better option. They can also be a better option than a cheap dedicated server depending on your needs and your VPS capabilities.
When looking for a VPS hoster, find out the hardware specs for the VPS that you will be running on, your guaranteed minimum CPU share, the guaranteed minimum bandwidth that you will have access to (this will be different than the server's bandwidth), how they meter bandwidth, if it's burstable, and what kind of support is included. You may also want to find out any burstable capabilities, e.g. extra CPU power, RAM, or bandwidth that you may use during short periods of time during periods of heavy activity.
The amount of RAM you buy is probably the most important. It's easy to eat up RAM if you plan on doing a lot of media upload and have an active site.
The setup work is more for a VPS or a dedicated server. You will need to secure and harden your installation and configure more parts of your server. At the same time this is also helpful because it allows you more control over how things work, its easier to optimize your environment and running Drupal is easier when you can change the apache, php and mysql settings yourself.
I would create a list of possible hosters, come up with a standard list of questions that concern you and your particular set up and mail them the questions. Just this step will allow you to start winnowing your list of providers based on responses, response time, etc.
Good Luck!
Try this
I have being using Siteground's services for a while now and I am very excited about the offers they give.
Go to Siteground and have a look.
I am hosting there my photography site and up till now I had no problems (similar to what you suggest) what so ever.
David Oster aka George Pasparakis
Siteground: think again...
It may all be a matter of bad luck (or overselling), but some other users have had a few complaints about Siteground.
Siteground
Mango,
thanks for the pointer.
I was really surprised when I started reading this!!!
The truth is that at some point I came across with the same scenario about moving to a new server.
BUT
except some minor delays on the availability of the server I had no problems what so ever.
Possibly it was an issue from their part and have fixed it now, just to proud to admit they messed it up.
Anyway, thank you very much for the pointer.
David Oster aka George Pasparakis
I personally spent two
I personally spent two miserable years with Anhosting, and I am very happy to have finally dropped them. Something was constantly breaking. One time they moved my site to a different box and changed the SQL server and never told me, thus breaking all of my sites. The techs were rude and unhelpful. They didn't give me SSH access, which I now realize is incredibly important. The worst problem had to do with file/folder owners and permissions. Files that were manipulated by PHP could not be manipulated by FTP. I think it must have been that the files were not owned by my unix account user, but rather by the php user or the ftp server user. I used to run Joomla, and I had to open up some directories to 777 to get it to work, due to the stupid file permission issues. As a result, I was CONSTANTLY getting hacked. That's my Anhosting experience, take it or leave it,
I agree VPS is probably the
I agree VPS is probably the way to go in this case.
Here's a list of affordable managed VPS plans:
http://www.hostingdiary.com/2007/09/best-vps-hostin.html
Andrew
SDX Hosting at JaguarPC.com best one yet.
I reccomend the SDX hosting at JaguarPC.com. You can think of it as shared hosting service on steroids.
It's much simpler these days.
I can't say much about Joomla's security problems, but I can see how an inexperienced user might have had problems understanding the Apache user and how to set up file permissions properly.
It should be noted that AN Hosting moved to a su_exec system in fall of 2007, which makes setting file permissions a non-issue, since everything is automatically under your user name.
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John Forsythe
VPS powered by Cloud Technology
Hi,
I have got a very good vps provider for you. http://www.host1plus.com/vps-hosting/ is providing VPS powered by cloud technology named 'OnApp' - industry leading cloud solution. Check it once from yourside.