I currently have a hosting package which I am not happy with for various reasons, but largely low availability & slow response times. I wanted to tap into people's expertise here to find out what type of package I should be considering.
To give you a bit of background info, I currently have a forum on a shared host with approx. 2000 members. I am not currently using Drupal, but as part of upgrading to a better provider I plan on integrating my forum (SMF) with Drupal 5 which sounds like it's possible without too much effort, hence the posting here, as I want to understand the load that will introduce on the server.
Within the next year I expect to have about 6000 members based on current growth. The most users I have had signed in at any one time so far has been 200, so I'm probably looking at 300-400ish if I hit 6000 members within the year. The typical number logged in though is around 20-30 (read 40ish when at 6000 members).
Typical bandwidth usage per visit is about 500K. I expect this to come down slightly though once I get a chance to do some optimizations. I get about 20,000 visits per month right now too.
So my question is once I upgrade to Drupal, considering there will be more interaction with DB etc. and given the rough figures above, should I need something like VPS, or will a shared host be sufficient? Anything else I should consider like the DB being on the same machine?
Comments
My site has about 400~500
My site has about 400~500 visitors per day and uses about 500mb to 1GB of band width.
And about 61,000 page views per month.
I used to use MediaTemple(MySQL container($20) + GS lite($7~8)- I don't think they offer this on the website but it was for their old customers)
Mediatemple had no problem handling my traffic when all the system is doing well, except it was very expensive for my need.
Recently MediaTemple had so many problems with there Grid Server. same thing happened twice in a month. page loading
time was around a minute. It's fixed now. but I switched anyway. I can't trust their GS service anymore.
I've been using MediaTemple for 3 years but I thought it was time to move on the something different.
I moved to AnHosting and been using it since yesterday:-)
I can't say for sure because I've been only using Anhosting for a day. but so far no problem and there support is really good.
Although they didn't send me any information about setting up email, ftp account and using cPanel.
(MediaTemple is really good with these stuff and FAQs)
speed is on par with MediaTemple when it was really fast but I don't have to pay $28 anymore :-)
I'm pretty happy with AnHosting. I'll leave updates here after using them for some more. They have 30 day money back grantee so if I don't like them I can always choose another company.
anyways AnHosting is doing Halloween sale now so check them out.