By nipper-1 on

Hi,

I am currently working on a commercial site using drupal 5. I can't say too much about it (NDAs!) but the idea is to have forums, blogs, news stories, and advertising. Lots of advertising. The eventual aim is hundreds of thousands of page impressions every month, hopefully millions.

So, what I need to know, and would really appreciate some info and just general knowledge, is can drupal handle this many, and is there anything in particular I need to do? Currently I have hosting with 1and1, it's not their biggest package, but not the smallest by far. I am guessing I would need a dedicated server somewhere, a big downstream and lots of memory. But what else? I dont want this thing to go 'POP' because a few thousand people try and access it on day 1.

I have about 30 modules installed, and run VIEWS in blocks on most of the pages, have tags and related content. Also, am running a highly customized theme, with about 12 or 13 different block spaces.

Thanks for your help people, tell me what you know!

Ed

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

chesslife’s picture

chesslife commented

I have a site with 125 modules, 169,000 users, 33,000 groups (still in development), well over 200,000 nodes in total... but I have 2 servers for the site. A shared hosting simply will not do. You at least need a dedicated server (2 is probably recommended in the event that one is overloaded or fails for whatever reason).

nipper-1’s picture

nipper-1 commented

can i see the site? thats some impressive stats! thanks for the quick reply. did you have to do anything in particular, or just set up and go? also, which drupal version are you running?

ed

chesslife’s picture

chesslife commented

At the moment there isn't a lot of public-facing content, but hopefully within a week or 2, I should have a fair amount of work done - enough to show off.

tmbejoy’s picture

tmbejoy commented

try http://www.theplanet.com it has a wide range of dedicated servers at an affordable rate.

HotDrupal.com’s picture

HotDrupal.com commented

I've generally heard good things about theplanet.com ...

In the past I've had good luck consulting for someone doing ongoing Admin for them on a dedicated server at LiquidWeb.com which has been rock solid as far as the network goes. Very happy with them.

Steve
Hot Drupal - Drupal Hosting

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

First, I have to say that the answer is always "it depends" ...

Depends on how many modules, how many nodes, how many users, how many taxonomy terms, how many comments, how many logged in users at one point, your hardware, and many other things ...

Having said that, hundreds of thousands of pages per month is very very doable with 30 modules. Even a MILLION PAGE VIEW PER DAY is possible!

You need to enable caching, and better yet go for memcache or cache router once traffic ramps up. You need to have block caching enabled too.

Start by reading Drupal performance tuning and optimization for large web sites and go from there.
--
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc.
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

nipper-1’s picture

nipper-1 commented

Thanks for all the comments, espically the one pointing me towards 'drupal performance...'. Its increadibly helpful to get some feedback on issues like this!