I'm trying to find a host that'd best fit our situation:

We have a few web properties that all have relatively low traffic, but occasionally, we'll run a huge campaign and get massive traffic for a short duration (usually less than 7 days).

Ideally we'd like a host that can fluctuate in pricing (cloud host?) to give us cheaper monthly costs when we don't utilize it much, and can easily ramp up without needing to move/change anything when we have those spikes!

Also, a managed solution, definitely don't want to manage the server/instance (otherwise, would've probably went with EC2).

as a bonus, if the site can resell (so we can charge clients for us hosting it) that'd be great...

Please help :) thanks in advance :P

Hi there,

I would suggest to go with a burstable dedicated server, burstable meaning you get a server with let's say 2500 Gb of traffic (rougly 10 Mbps) but is on a 100 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps uplink port. That way you always have enough capacity for when a campaign is launched. As it is your own server you don't need to move data either. If the included bandwidth level is not sufficient during your peaks you only pay extra for the additional traffic if you use it.

Most hosting companies offer management services or Service Level Agreements for their dedicated servers and I am sure we are not the only one with a reseller / affiliate program ;-)

interesting! thanks for the tip!

would "cloud" hosts like rackspace be overkill then for my needs? are we not allowed to talk about specific hosts on the forums? :X

I think cloud hosting is not really required, a decent dedicated server will do the job. Cloud hosting is more interesting when you are in the need for a lot of cpu or memory to do calculations etc. Your needs are not that high :-)

As a hosting company we are limited in what we can say or post, I am not sure what the exact do's and don'ts are as it is kinda grey area in my opinion but I don't like to see my account getting blocked ;-)

Of course there have to be rules as this board has thousands of hosting companies on it so otherwise it would be one big advertising and spamming operation.

But the requirements you post are average so a lot of dedicated server providers will be able to help you out.

What kind of traffic are you talking about here, and what sort of websites (dynamic/static)?

Even large dedicated servers can crumble under the weight of some traffic influxes. It's also a single point of failure - you don't want your client to be running a large campaign and then have a server issue that takes your one server offline. Just some things worth considering.

Cloud hosting is not required, but it is easier to scale resources when the host has cloud infrastructure in place. With a cloud environment, a host can change the number of CPU and amount of memory dedicated to a VM within minutes. With a cloud, the customer can order a small VM and then quickly upgrade it to a more powerful VM at any time. With the usual dedicated server offerings, you need to buy the biggest server right off the back because upgrading physical servers can be time consuming. Some upgrades might require moving to completely different hardware. By contrast, most cloud environments can live migrate (move a VM to another physical box while it is running) to more powerful equipment without causing any downtime.

Just for fun one day, we played around with live migrate in our own cloud environment. We set up a game server running Counter Strike Source and a few of our techs connected and played on it while another tech moved the virtual machine around using live migrate. Live migrate did not cause any downtime. In fact, it did not even interfere with game play. There was just a brief 100ms lag spike right when the live migrate cut the gaming VM to a different physical server within the blade center. For web and email hosting, nobody would have even noticed the live migrate at all. I cannot even begin to stress how much smoother that is than manually moving things around between physical/dedicated servers. Cloud computing is a blast.