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Is Rimuhosting enough for my task?
Hello again,enough praise cannot be given to Dries, his support staff, and the community for making such a wonderful product called Drupal. I also, want to join the community and generate income for myself from Drupal open source. Also, I plan to give back to the community ANY WAY POSSIBLE.
My Dilema is as follows:After doing extensive reading, and learning the Drupal system, I came to the conclusion that the best way to "sell" Drupal is, as a service. Namely, as a hosting service, ala bryght.com
My friends and I plan to start a company in our country (Trinidad and Tobago) that offers Drupal services (hosting mostly) Drupal is not at all popular in this country so, we think, with some thought Drupal can be made known in another country and at the same time we earn a living. So,we looked at http://www.bryght.com business model and decided that's the best route to take. We plan to offer pseudo pre-packaged drupal installation geared towards different goals. Our first is, a Drupal package that allows customers' small business to get online in "no time" We plan to do this by creating a pre-configured Drupal instance where "products and services" "about us" "contact form" a View created for "Press events, News, and media releases. And all customers have to do is input their company info and have a neat easily accessible Company site. This is our proposed package (it can change) The real issue is, hosting plans. As I said we want to start off small so, I don't think a Dedicated server solution is needed right now (we foresee growth though) We decided the best of both worlds solution would be a VPS. And, I came across http://rimuhosting.com/ And, for the small start we are making the MiroVPS2 looks ok. But, I don't k now much about what "ok" should look like (I once though ipower was the best thing since slice bread) The specs of the Miro2VPS are:
Monthly Price :$29.95
Memory Options :160MB
Data Transfer Allowance:40GB
Disk Space Options:4GB-8GB
IPs:2
Plesk Control Panel Option:No
Data Center: Dallas (TX)
This is the VPS we are looking into. I would like to know if this is "good enough" for what we are planning to do. Also, what caveat we must look for when stepping into the world of hosting. What pitfalls to look out for, that may pop up? Advice from people who are more experienced than us would be VALUED. Should we continue with our plan? Or should we close up shop and seek revenue else where? And, any other use full info would be VERY much appreciated. Thanking the Drupal community in advance. Kudos.
Andre.
Andre. I don't think that's
Andre.
I don't think that's such a great deal at all. You'll easily use that up. I use Siteground.com (my referral id added :-) )and they have really good packages and the speed of their server is amazing. (Had another b4 this that was just crawling). You have to be careful where you host Drupal. Last host (1and1.com) also started to give 500 Errors after I installed a certain amount of modules.
I mistakenly got a reseller package thinking I needed that, not realizing, I could have simply used addon domains (have domains point to mywebsite/folder).
It would only cost be $5.95 per month doing that. Check out the space etc...way better than this rimu crap.
Student from Guyana @ Howard btw....real Trinis here. I bet I know somebody who knows you.
Rimuhosting and Sitegrounds
Rimuhosting and Sitegrounds provide completely different services.
Sitegrounds is a SHARED hosting provider. Rimuhosting provides Xen slices and dedicated servers. Xen slices *guarantee* a certain amount of CPU and RAM -- with sitegrounds, you get what you get (and it's far under what you're going to get with a rimuhosting VPS). It's convenient to think of Xen slices as mini-dedicated servers -- there's a few differences, but in general, it's like having your own box. You get root, you get to install whatever services you want, you get to configure apache and mysql however you want, etc etc. With a shared host, you're at the mercy of their configuration. Ever tried to convince a shared host to install a module for PHP or update installed software?
Rimuhosting's packages are very competitive when you're comparing VPS services. (You may look at linode's packages as well -- I was able to get Rimuhosting to bump up the RAM in our plan a bit by asking them if they could price-match a similar linode package). We are developing a drupal site on a rimuhosting VPS and so far I have been very happy with it (we've only been with them about a month at this point, however).
Sure, sitegrounds will give you loads of space -- but this will have little effect on the performance of your site (which I assume would be your main concern). Realistically, it's unlikely that web apps will use more than 4GB -- you have to upload a lot of photos to fill 4GB, and the drupal core is like what, a meg or two? More importantly, on sitegrounds the performance of your site is a toss up -- on a server where nobody's running a resource hog? Hey, maybe you'll be alright. On a server with two thousand other users? Sucks to be you. Now try running a multi-site install that could be attempting to deliver a dozens pages a second (well, if you're lucky with signing up users) -- i seriously doubt the capability of a shared hosting account at sitegrounds to handle this.
Randomly enough, in this comparision, I can speak from direct experience. We were running an initial dev build of our drupal site on a sitegrounds shared account while we were waiting to get a client go-ahead to set up a VPS (on my insistence, because developing on sitegrounds was TERRIBLY slow -- it's already bad that drupal config is largely done through web menus, but to have to wait for drupal to render pages on a slow host???). we picked the rimuhosting microVPS4 (it was between rimuhosting or servint, and I went with rimu because they had xen -- which is a newer VPS tech). The site performance increased noticeably, plus we're able to install the tools *we* want to use, set up svn, rsync, etc etc etc. If you are doing serious development, it's worth it to have root.
As far as whether it can handle drupal -- well, we have the microvps4 and drupal seems to render pretty snappily, although there is some lag introduced by our un-merged css files (right now we're doing like 30 requests to render a page, which is ridiculous). What kind of load can it pull? Don't know -- we haven't put it under heavy testing. However, rimuhosting can allocate more memory, etc for you up to a certain point, so presumedly, if you started to get enough load to need more resources, you could just put a little more money into hosting. We haven't done a lot of load testing yet (or any config optimization) so i can't speak to pages per second, etc.
Last host (1and1.com) also started to give 500 Errors after I installed a certain amount of modules.
this is likely because you were running on a server that was lagged for whatever reason (overselling) and could not complete your request in time. Was it linked to all the CPU time/mem you were chewing up with extra modules? Maybe -- hard to tell when you're running on a shared host. This could easily happen with sitegrounds as well.
However, if you are not well-versed in setting up and configuring linux or don't want to learn, you might want to think twice about VPS at rimuhosting and go with a fully-managed server somewhere, so there's someone around to config/setup for you (downside is often these places won't give you root because they don't want to fix your mistakes)
EDIT: on dedicated vs VPS, get some hard numbers on drupal performance needs. Dedicated costs are much much higher than VPS, and depending on how many users you sign up, you may not need that power. That said you probably will eventually, so it may make sense to start out on a server that will provide you the opportunity for growth without having to go through a server migration (which would be an absolute bear). Consider this, however: VPS will have a low upfront cost, and you can always ADD additional packages as you gain users. IE, put X users on one VPS slice and monitor the performance -- when it starts getting poor, and you get X+1, purchase an additional package from Rimu (or whoever) and set up another server.
Realistically
If you want to host lots of sites, you are going to need dedicated server(s).
A virtual host like that could be ok for a single low traffic site or a bunch of very low traffic sites, but you'd probably want more memory anyway.
If any of your sites start getting moderate traffic a small virtual server will that will quickly be brought to its knees.
--
Anton
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THanks for replies
Thanks a bunch for your replies. I am in the process of looking at http://www.siteground.com dedicated server solutions. I had a feeling that that rimu hosting package was not enough. I would have to look at some medium powered dedicated servers then. Thanks a bunch, for replies.
Andre.
God bless.
Other VPS host
Hi Andre,
I'm using for myself this hosting provider: Eapps http://www.eapps.com
Mainly for their very good Java options. But I think PHP is the same.
What I also like about their service: it has a very slick user interface (control panel) and you can use ssh.
Furthermore they keep the software up-to-date.
Just a suggestion.
Cheers,
Marc
Another option to consider
Another option to consider can be "reseller" hosting, too. You can choose one good reseller package, and use it, or better to say "resell" it.
If you choose vps or dedicated host, you have two options. One is to but cheaper, unmenaged hosting (vps or dedicated), where your job is to handle almost everything - this is rimuhosting (btw, as I heard, they are quite good).
Another option is managed hosting, but you need more money. With good managed hosting, you don't need to worry (a lot) about server updates, or some complex configs ...
If you can handle rimuhosting vps, start with their vps. When your business overgrow their service, move to dedicated host.
---
Drupal Themes Live Preview - themegarden.org
Great Idea
Good Idea. I hreally have NO experience in server maintainance, so, a managed hosts would suit me well. However, I don't think rimu offers such a service. Also, most "good" dedicated are over $100US($600 in our currency)per month. I don't want to plunk down all that cash and our company don't do well. How much expensive managed servers are than unmanaged. It have a TON of web hosts out there. Also, how is http://www.bryght.com reseller packages? WOuld that be an option?
THanks once again for your support
God Bless.
Andre.