How much RAM do I need? Host recommendation.

Posted by Jaso30 on November 12, 2012 at 9:33pm

Hi Guys

I am in the process of rebuilding my existing Wordpress site with Drupal. At the moment I am hosting with Site5 shared cloud hosting at $20/month (currently way over their 100GB b/width limit but have not been asked to move up yet).

Currently I get about 35k visits / month. At peak I have about 10 active users at one time. Max is about 25. I read somewhere that Drupal needs about 128MB per active user. Is this a good rule of thumb?

We are looking to add image uploads and a forum so this might increase resource demand a bit? I expect traffic to grow rapidly over the next few months so scalability would be preferable. Any recommendations for hosting to met my requirements? Going by 128MB/active user I will need about 2-3GB of RAM now, which translates to about $179/month on managed cloud (Site5) and $80 (Linode). Managed would be good as I am a newbie!

Good to hear your thoughts.

Comments

I suggest a Managed VPS

Posted by a2hosting-andy on November 12, 2012 at 10:04pm

A managed VPS would a good route to go. The estimate of 128MB per active user seems a little high to me, but it would also depend on what the typical user is doing on your site. With a managed VPS you have the option of adding RAM/disk space as needed without any downtime.

You can also squeeze more traffic into a smaller amount of ram if you effectively use caching such as memcached or APC.

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Normally, 64MB per active

Posted by seanray on November 14, 2012 at 10:29am

Normally, 64MB per active user is good enough. But I see you plan to add image upload feature, which might ask for a lot of memory when processing images, here is a post for your reference http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5253732/how-to-calculate-the-memory-n....

If you need to resize a large image, then 128MB will be a good number.

A good practices is to sign up a host which allows to scale in memory. Then you can start with 64MB per active use, if you see there is memory error, then increase it to 128MB. Monitor the site performance again, upgrade it until you see a new issue.

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I definitely recommend

Posted by inogenius on November 14, 2012 at 6:51pm

I definitely recommend looking for a host that allows you to easily scale memory. That is typically going to be the first constraint you run across, however allowing image uploads may also cause issues with storage space.

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Thanks guys

Posted by Jaso30 on November 15, 2012 at 7:22pm

Thanks - good points made. I didn't realise how tricky finding a host would be!

At the moment I have narrowed it down to a couple of hosts. The frontrunner being Dediserve. Doing some a bit of background research I have found that they are quite reliable. Although, a thread on Webhostingtalk has identified quite a lot of variation in IO rates and speculation that this would continue to degrade going forward. Is this a general cloud problem or specific to this host? Furthermore, and more importantly, are variable IO rates likely to materially impact my Drupal site?

Cheers,

Jason

Definitely recommended to get

Posted by euro-space.net on December 3, 2012 at 1:25pm

Definitely recommended to get managed VPS, would be better even with cPanel and WHM for easy administration.
Though you can make tries with memory i.e. memory_limit = 128M via php.ini

Cheers.

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