By nickb2 on

Hi All,

I work for a newspaper and handle our website, currently on Wordpress on GoDaddy shared hosting. Its extremely slow. A friend told me about Drupal and I'm considering redoing our site, but I've been reading that Drupal can also run slow depending on host.

I don't have a lot of technical expertise, but I do know we get 10-20k hits a day and I want super fast response times, without having to configure and setup a server myself.

Are there any hosts that can handle 10-20k hits a day without slow page loads that are DruPal friendly? I don't want shared hosting, with 'unlimited' bandwidth because when you're hosting popular content on Wordpress or Drupal that 'unlimited' pipeline doesn't really mean a thing.

Thanks,
Nick

Comments

saepl’s picture

saepl commented

you might want to look at media temple. It's like the next step up from shared hosting

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Pretty much any dedicated host will be fine for a site your size. I'd recommend the $75 "Valueline Green" offer from ServerBeach.com; it has 2 gigs of RAM. We've been running Drupal sites on ServerBeach for years. We have one box that's five years old and current uptime is 362 days without a reboot.

Couple of obvious things you should do:

* Tune MySQL properly. Defaults often aren't reasonable. A few minutes with Google will find some example configs.
* Install Boost so you don't fire up Drupal for most anonymous traffic.
* Install APC for bytecode cache, and give it plenty of memory.
* Consider using Cacherouter to move your cache tables into APC user cache.

sreyas’s picture

sreyas commented

Consider switching to cloud hosting.. You only pay for the resources and the bandwidth being used.. That is you can choose different configurations for servers.. and need to pay for bandwidth being used only..

Check http://aws.amazon.com/ or http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

Regards
Sreyas

------------------
Ciril Sreedhar
Sreyas IT Solutions
Server Administration | Web Designing | Web Programming

jp2020’s picture

jp2020 commented

Hi Sreyas,
I briefly looked at both.

    Amazon

Amazon, did not seem to have a great customer service, and the signing in process kept booting me into Amazon.com - also, it seem a bit more complicated, as there are different services one must sign up for and configure, so is there a video to set this up?

    Rackspace

Then I chatted with rackspace. I am impressed with their 24/7 chat service. They are very upfront and friendly, though they did indicate that perhaps I would want to consider going with WordPress for better performance (but this is besides the point).

Sreyas, they have two main options:
1. cloud server < Instantly available server instances in a variety of sizes. Upgrade, downgrade, or remove a server at any time.>> and
2. cloud site $149 (starting) here is the product link (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/sites/pricing).

Here is a copy of my chat with Rackspace:

    My question:

I expect to first develop the Drupal site and would like to have it on a web environment to see how it behaves on the web. Then I would have the site go live, perhaps just a small amount of traffic for a few months, and from there on some heavier traffic is expected. What would be your suggestion? Stick to one hosting company the entire time? Is a pain to switch?

Note:I am by no way affiliated with either one just wanted to share what I have learned, as I hope this will be helpful to others and at the same time figure out how to proceed with my hosting decision.

Thanks,
JP

seanray’s picture

seanray commented

You can purchase a shared hosting as your development as the traffic is very low there. Bluehost, ANhosting all provide very good service.

once in production, your traffic goes up and will need a more powerful one. VPS or dedicated server is expected. Hostgator, InmotionHosting all provides great solution in that area.

If you don't care to work with single host, you can choose hostgator, they provide quite comprehensive solution from shared hosting, vps hosting to dedicated server hosting.

scutiger’s picture

scutiger commented

Hey Nick,

I think we can help you out here, we have been doing some personalized hosting [means that there are actual humans that look after you :)]. We can hook you up with the right kind of setups that you need for you drupal/wordpress needs.

We are primarily a system admin team, and have been working with setups that have over 500 mysql queries per second ! So I am sure we can solve your issues.

Cheers,
Scutiger

patrick101’s picture

patrick101 commented

I agree with Saepl .. Media Temple is actually the best host for high traffic websites. Their cloud environment is well priced too. Although you can find cheaper alternatives but their reputation is a bit questionable. You can also try VPS from hostgator or bluehost.