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  1. #1

    Hosting question for a growing business

    Hey all,

    Need some help with finding a new hosting company, as Host Gator's downtime is making a serious impact on my business.

    The site is at 750,000-850,000 Visits a month (per Google Analytics). Peaks go up to 1.5 million Vists/month.

    Reliable uptime is crucial. We had HostGator go down for 12 hours in the middle of our most important event of the year for 2013.

    The site has a fairly heavy image load, but nothing outrageous. It's a news-based site, with one main image, and then some background images, images on links to other stories, etc.

    I get the impression that my site's code is not well optimized, but it is a project that our Tech lead claims to be working on (if I believed him, then I probably wouldn't be asking this question right now).

    SO, who can help? Any advice is welcome. We're open to everything - dedicated, cloud servers, etc. Cost is an issue as with any prudent business, but a cheap, unreliable answer is worse than a costlier, reliable answer.

    Thanks in Advance!

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    301
    Is your website highly dynamic - images served from a database or mostly static?

    Other than the downtime, what was the performance like with Host Gator?

    Were you using shared or dedicated with them?

    Post a link to your website too.
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  3. #3
    I knew there was more information needed, wasn't sure what. Thanks for the response.

    There's a mix of static and dynamic images. The large, featured image is static. The smaller, side images I described are dynamic, but not highly dynamic (they don't change that often...change infrequently based on some given logarithim).

    Other than the major, catastrophic downtimes, the service was good, not great. Page load times are very slow (again, that could be as much optimized code as anything). Relatively frequent intermittent downtime.

    This catastrophic stuff is what hurts our business. We have the money to spend on a cloud-based hosting solution...I know enough about the technical stuff to get myself in trouble, but I just don't know what the drawbacks are, or if that would truly help us avoid these situations.

  4. #4
    Sorry, and to answer the last question. I believe that we are a shared server...but not 100% positive on that. We pay ~$375 a month, if that helps give you an idea of what we probably have.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Posts
    83
    For your static content, are you using any CDN's such as CloudFlare?

    It also sounds like you have a technical person on your team. Have they considered offloading the MySQL work to a separate server?
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  6. #6
    We do have CloudFlare.

    Yes, there is a technical person on his team. No, I don't think he knows what he's doing as much as he has sold himself to my partners that he does. I will definitely make that suggestion to him.

    Any suggestions for a new hosting company?

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    301
    If you're paying about $375/mo. that's most likely a dedicated server. Like bestssdhost mentioned, you may want to offload the database to another server and have one server just for static images/graphics. Without knowing more about your setup, it would be hard to provide a good recommendation.

    Can you post the website address?
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  8. #8
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Posts
    83
    You may want to discuss purchasing two servers: a very fast, high read/write MySQL server and then a front end web server (modestly equipped - mostly uses RAM and CPU) to handle the web requests. This will help with the strain. Right now your server is doing all the DB work and web request work and it's just too much.

    You can check the offers section for some of the current specials. You may also want to look at Rackspace's 'Deployments' feature where they have canned scenarios and environment for these types of loads (with clustering, load balancing, etc).
    BestSSDHost.com - Ditch your slow host and choose the best!

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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location
    Lake Zurich, IL
    Posts
    436
    I suspect this will require more than just throwing hardware at the issue, which means finding a good consultant to help find the bottleneck(s) and find a reliable hosting company (usually consultants have recommendations on trusted providers they have used too).

    Note that if the site is popular, you might also be experiencing extra activity from bots crawling the site. We have a few customers that have run into that issue with large Wordpress sites that have a crazy number of content items per page (with load times being slow). When crawlers hit the site, every page on the site is visited, which can run into the 10's of thousands of pages loaded by a crawler every day to two days. CPU usage spikes to well over 30GHz (combined across all CPUs) for one of these sites.

    Eric
    Genesis Hosting Solutions, LLC (genesishosting.com)
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  10. #10
    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Posts
    2,103
    As suggested above you might want to try putting the Database on a separate server. Perhaps you might consider using an SSD Dedicated Server for your database, this might improve performance slightly, and then try using a service such as CloudFlare for your website, this'll load the images a lot quicker and take strain off your server.

  11. #11
    I always suggest people use interserver.net, they have pretty good VPS prices and I have yet to come into issues with down time

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    Above The Clouds
    Posts
    7,223
    Your solution will depend on how much money the website generates and how critical it is to have online (i.e. brand issues - site needs to appear stable even if it doesn't generate revenue but the bricks and mortar business does).

    So $375/mo is dedicated server territory and if you are seeing loads on that you have to separate web and db server. Web server handles all the traffic, database server handles most of the IO overhead.

    If a stable website is worth another $400/mo then you need a decent server with SSD drives, preferarbly in RAID 10. The CPU size will really depend on how many concurrent visitors you do. For high traffic sites a dual proc is always the best way forward but be prepared to shell out more money.

    Off the top of my head, 2 x Dual Proc CPU, each with 4 x 240gb SSD RAID 10 and 24gb memory each FULLY MANAGED is going cost over $1000/mo. You will need a fully managed solution to help tweak the server. You'll need Nginx + APC or Varnish, decent file system (xfs not ext4 for example) and considerable tweaking here and there depending on how busy your site gets.
    Laurence Flynn @ HostNEXUS.com
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