Large site web hosting......what is the solution?

[Waluigi]

I've been a web designer for 5 years now, and I feel it is time to consolidate all my work for my clients, and get my own webspace for all my personal projects. I was looking into Dot5 Dedecated hosting for $75/mo. Would that be enough to host a website like macrumors.com? It will have a vBulliten forum on it, and I have no idea how much space that takes up. I do know, that I will need a LOT of bandwidth, and pages have to load fast, including large flash files. Is there something out there for less then $300/mo that would be able to host a very large site like macrumors, and still be very reliable and fast? It will also have Google Adsense, but I don't know if that generate any revenue. How much money is realistic for about 500,000 views/mo?

--Waluigi

 

[Waluigi]

Wow, no one has any expierence in hosting a large website?

 

[arn]

Re: Large site web hosting......what is the solution?

Heh...

Lots of questions....

Moving to a dedicated sever can be for a few primary reasons:

1) Bandwidth... usually you have a much higher bandwidth limit.
2) Processing Power - you are running scripts/pages which are bogging down shared servers
3) Freedom - to do things and install things you want.

Now, the $75/mo Dedicated from dot5 Hosting would not likely be able to host MacRumors. It's hard to compare sites though. A server like that could easily serve tons of static pages. The forums and mysql server for MacRumors requires a bit more power.

We are currently on 2 Dedicated servers.

Dual P3 w/ 2GB RAM for forums/mysql
Single P3 w/ 1GB RAM for macrumors.com

along with my other smaller projects.

When you say a LOT of bandwidth, how much are we talking?

arn

 

[Waluigi]

Re: Re: Large site web hosting......what is the solution?

Originally posted by arn
When you say a LOT of bandwidth, how much are we talking?

Thanks for the info

Well, I'm getting about 500,000 hits a month on a page that is about 50Kb.

I'm also going to have a vBulliten fourm, like this one, and I have no idea how much bandwidth I can expect from that. Right now, I have about 80,000 posts, and 5000 users on a free board, in the last 2 years, and like macrumors.com, it is just increasing exponentially.

On top of that, I have all my flash based websites (about 20 different 1MB intros, and 1.5MB pages) that get 100,000 hits a month, which really eats up bandwidth.

I don't have the time to host myself, so I'm looking for a reliable, and not overpriced service. I need something with good speed, and uptime.

--Waluigi

 

[tazo]

Re: Re: Re: Large site web hosting......what is the solution?

Originally posted by Waluigi
Thanks for the info

Well, I'm getting about 500,000 hits a month on a page that is about 50Kb.

I'm also going to have a vBulliten fourm, like this one, and I have no idea how much bandwidth I can expect from that. Right now, I have about 80,000 posts, and 5000 users on a free board, in the last 2 years, and like macrumors.com, it is just increasing exponentially.

On top of that, I have all my flash based websites (about 20 different 1MB intros, and 1.5MB pages) that get 100,000 hits a month, which really eats up bandwidth.

I don't have the time to host myself, so I'm looking for a reliable, and not overpriced service. I need something with good speed, and uptime.

--Waluigi

**** what site are you running that gets that many hits? Can I have some?

 

[Waluigi]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Large site web hosting......what is the solution?

Originally posted by tazo
**** what site are you running that gets that many hits? Can I have some?

When you put the words "Harry Potter" in the meta tag, you'll get lots of hits too .

--Waluigi

 

[shecky]

for the level of sites & bandwidth you are using you definetly want managed hosting on your own server - it seems to me your loads will be a bit too intense for a shared soloution. I can reccomend Rackspace as a good bigname company, but what i would STRONGLY suggest you do is to go to the Webhosting forums at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ , sign up, and make a post explaing what your needs are and people there will tell you what you really should be looking for (this is a great source of information, the forum is insanely busy and you will get a LOT of input) That is also a good place to have people bid for you as well, you can post with what you are looking for and people will quote you out.

I can speak from experinece that i had a site that at its peak did a million hits a month, and while i was on shared hosting, it was feeling the strain, mostly because the host i was with was not prepared to actually have me USE all the bandwidth i paid for (the bastards). Managed hosting of your own server gives you a much better soloution.

you really need to get a feel for the host as well, what datacenter the server is in, what kinds of support they offer (for $300 a month you damn well better be able to call them on the phone - none of this email crap) and so on and so forth. One thing i will say that is very definitive: You get what you pay for. DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT go for the cheapest soloution, because you will invariably be dissapointed long term.