My company handles newsletters and sites for large non-profit organizations and when our first 100,000+ newsletter went out (we use a separate service for email) the response brought down our shared server (of course).

So, we know if we continue to have this kind of response we need to go to a managed dedicated server, but I was hoping to get some advice on what I should be looking for as far as specifications go.

While we don't expect that amount of traffic more than once a month, we still need to make sure we can handle the sudden burst.

Thanks in advance.

look for a decent cpu that you can afford but with high ram, around at least 2-4GB of RAM as mass mails like this are RAM hungry...

You might not really need management, unless you want to make sure all aspects of the Linux environment are taken care of by the company providing your server , such as software updates, security checks, and so on. Do you have a budget in mind?

You definitely need a dedicated server and I suggest you to speak to some dedicated hosts and to ask them how they could help you to handle the email marketing. The machines should be powerful enough. I think that A Quad-Core powered machine with 4GB RAM will work fine for you.

Re:Budget
I've already prepped my manager for $200+, but whatever solution I find, whatever the price, it will be a hard sell. I've gotten a range from $230 to $400, but it's hard to compare prices unless I'm asking for something specific. Making sure I have at least 2 to 4GB of RAM is a great start.

And managed is preferred. I'm no server admin and don't want to pretend to be one. One day, I will learn on my own time, but not today.

You should know the following before purchasing a server with X specs:

- what was exactly the traffic that came in (uniques, hits, total online users at a time etc.)
- is your site static or dynamic (and what language, does it use database backend etc.)
- what are the specs of the current server that could not handle this traffic

Just giving you X RAM and X CPU does not help if we do not know some more details.

Also, did the 100,000 newsletter sent in just one day? You could send them in a batch for x days and the traffic will be shared in those days.

The price for managed hosting depends on various factors: quality of hardware (redundant parts), backups, server specs etc.

Also, when comparing prices on managed servers - find out EXACTLY what is included with the management. Managed services vary greatly from one provider to the next. You'll want to know what each one includes so that you can do an accurate comparison.

--Tina

Also, did the 100,000 newsletter sent in just one day? You could send them in a batch for x days and the traffic will be shared in those days.

The price for managed hosting depends on various factors: quality of hardware (redundant parts), backups, server specs etc.

First - thanks so much for all the helpful advice so far. I really appreciate everyone taking the time today.

The newsletter did go out in one day (not my choice). I would rather it get spread out over three days to manage traffic better. Since that's part of the "human problem" of the equation, I have to think of the possibility that I can't overcome that obstacle.

The current shared system is a Pentium 4 3.0GHZ with 2GB ram. I wish I had full stats for that day, as the server choked not long after the newsletter was sent. Total bandwidth for the day was over 7GB, before and after the crash.

While I have a few sites with MySQL backends, the hard hit site was all static HTML.

hbflyte,

Without steering you away from a managed dedicated server too much, perhaps some kind of high-capacity shared hosting might be in order for the post-email campaign hosting? Essentially, the stuff marketed to web sites who are occasionally "slashdot"ed or "digg"ed.

Such hosting seems to be a really inexpensive way to handle bursts of traffic. A subdomain might facilitate just hosting the newsletter-related web site landing page on that kind of high-capacity burstable shared server (e.g. http://www2.whatever.com/newsletter_landing.html).

That kind of setup also gets you away from any issues in terms of sending the emails; you (apparently) already send the emails just fine on your current setup, and they reach the recipients (and not bulk email boxes), so you might not want to leave that successful setup.

All that said... Managed dedicated hosting is an excellent option, and that may be the best route. But I wanted to mention a potentially less expensive alternative that might fit your unique once-per-month traffic burst needs.

-mike

Since this is a static site you can have a high availability site in a very cheap way (with round robin dns). No special setup needed.


The main idea is that you get 3-4 shared accounts of quality providers, use a central redundant dns system (for each hosting account you add an A record) and everytime someone requests your site the IP will be selected automatically. This would work fine. Just remember to use 1 hosting account for the mail service and disable mails on the other hosts.

This setup would go much less than 50$ per month :)

Just forgot to mention: every time you need to update your site you should do :
- upload the content to all hosting accounts or
- update only 1 server and setup a cron (or standalone script) to update the 'slave' servers with rsync or ftp etc.

If the content is just static html files your current server should be fine.

Just needs to be optimised properly...

Were the image paths for the newsletters pointing to this shared server? If so, that might have been what caused your problem as the messages were opened and there was a flood of HTTP connections. Many email services will host your newsletter images (within reason; there's usually a KB limit) to help with these sorts of problems; you might check to see if your current provider offers this feature.