I know this is an obtuse question with a lot of “it depends” and variables, but generally speaking, what constitutes “high traffic”? I’ll be moving a site that averages 20k hits a month with spikes quadruple that number. Is that a lot? I’m wondering if the “average” shared server/host is designed to handle a load like that or should I look at MediaTemple or similar; hosts that are known for their ability to handle bursts.
It’s very important to clarify what you mean by hits. Each photo on a page, each JavaScript link, each HTML page counts as a hit, if you’re completely pedantic about it. Not all log analysis software breaks that out for you in a meaningful way.
If you mean 20,000 unique visitors a month, that’s great, and probably a good idea to think about a “bursty” VPS, like a Joyent Accelerator. (Not all VPSen can burst through to the other processors/memory on the same physical machine, and Joyent sets theirs up so they can.)
If you mean literally 20,000 hits, then divide by an average number of additional resources per page, and drill down in your logs to see how many of those requests were filled from browser cache. You may not need anything besides a not-too-badly-oversold shared Apache host.
Walter
On Oct 31, 2011, at 3:42 AM, Todd wrote:
I know this is an obtuse question with a lot of “it depends” and variables, but generally speaking, what constitutes “high traffic”? I’ll be moving a site that averages 20k hits a month with spikes quadruple that number. Is that a lot? I’m wondering if the “average” shared server/host is designed to handle a load like that or should I look at MediaTemple or similar; hosts that are known for their ability to handle bursts.
Yes, 20k-80k unique visitors/month and it’s just going to increase in the coming months thanks to TV exposure.
I had a very quick look at Joyent but didn’t see any pricing info. I get the feeling that MediaTemple might be less “techy” to use than Joyent which, if true, is an important consideration for the client.
The ones you want are down at the bottom of that table, $124/mo and up. That’s what Liberty Fund runs on, and it’s proven so battle-ready that not even the Chinese hackers can DOS it out of existence. It’s kind of funny, really – they try to flood it with requests for all the giant PDFs in the library, and Joyent just sends them the files. They choke on what they requested, while the server stays up and serving other customers.
Walter
On Oct 31, 2011, at 11:01 AM, Todd wrote:
Yes, 20k-80k unique visitors/month and it’s just going to increase in the coming months thanks to TV exposure.
I had a very quick look at Joyent but didn’t see any pricing info. I get the feeling that MediaTemple might be less “techy” to use than Joyent which, if true, is an important consideration for the client.
Do you have experience with MediaTemple? Opinions seem extremely polarized, not much middle-ground from what I’ve read.
I tried them briefly a few years ago (30-day trial) and while I liked the service (seemed very professional) I couldn’t justify the cost for my low-traffic rinky-dink site. However, this current project seems a good match.
I tried them out for a project about a year ago, and haven’t tried them since. They were not a good fit for the client, and we ended up with Dreamhost because they needed more disk space than MT offered. I have heard all sorts of opinions about them, but I don’t really have one either way myself. I’ve been ridiculously pleased with Joyent over the years, beginning back in 2006 or so when I started dinking around with Rails.
Walter
On Oct 31, 2011, at 12:24 PM, Todd wrote:
Do you have experience with MediaTemple? Opinions seem extremely polarized, not much middle-ground from what I’ve read.
I tried them briefly a few years ago (30-day trial) and while I liked the service (seemed very professional) I couldn’t justify the cost for my low-traffic rinky-dink site. However, this current project seems a good match.
That really depends entirely on what you’re asking the server to do. If you’re running a simple CRUD application (Create Read Update Delete) in PHP, then you will probably be fine with the smallest thing you can get. But if you are doing heaver server-side processing, modifying files, accepting file uploads, etc., then your memory footprint will be twice or two and a half times the size of the largest file you plan to modify. And if your site is going to be as busy as all that, you should also plan on that memory footprint for each of the spare servers Apache will spin up to handle that load. Apache2 usually starts with 2 - 5 servers, and then it starts getting serious about adding more instances. Look at your server under load with top and see how many copies of httpd you see in that list.
Walter
On Oct 31, 2011, at 12:48 PM, Todd wrote:
we ended up with Dreamhost because they needed more disk space than MT offered.
Looked at Dreamhost VPS pricing http://dreamhost.com/servers/vps/. What’s the rule of thumb for determining a good starting point? 300MB, 600MB, etc.?