By saml on

I'm setting up Drupal for a site with some 2000-3000 visits per day (99% anonymous users) with max peaks around 10000 (visits/day), and is looking for a shared host, as I hope that would suffice?

What about Bluehost? Experiences of running a site of this dimension on Bluehost, anybody?
Other alternatives I'm looking into is AN Hosting and Dreamhost. Any other alternatives welcome too, if you can motivate =).

I read that Bluehost run PHP via FastCGI. What does that implicate in terms of running Drupal?

Modules I plan to activate:

  • CCK
  • Views
  • OG
  • Image
  • Event
  • PEAR Wiki filter
  • Pathauto
  • Print
  • Forward
  • Troll
⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

arzajac’s picture

arzajac commented

I think that the biggest impact on performance is how the database is accessed rather than php/cgi. See this thread (http://drupal.org/node/110531). I think most providers use php as CGI these days.

Hosting provers that run a database server on a different machine than the webserver can suffer from lag because the web server is accessing the database through a small pipe. If the database server is on the localhost, you avoid that problem.

As to whether a shared host would suffice? I dunno. If much of your content is accessed by anonymous users, perhaps you will be able to get by just by using caching.

saml’s picture

saml commented

Thanks! The link was exactly what I needed. Looks like HostMonster has some advantages over BlueHost since the databases are installed on the local servers. Any comments?

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

With 10,000 page views, shared is risky.

With shared hosting, you have no visibility nor control on other sites using resources from the server you share. If there is another site that is hogging the database, your site will suffer. If another site gets on digg, your site will also suffer, ...etc.

Stay away from Dreamhost, because they force the database to be on another box.

CGI and FastCGI are very different. The former sucks big time, don't use it. The latter is good (drupal.org runs on FastCGI).

With this traffic, I would go for a VPS, to be safe, but because you have 99% anonymous, you can install the boost module and see if it works.
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saml’s picture

saml commented

Thanks a lot!
That's very valuable comments.