Hello everyone,

i developed my own php based gallery over the past few months and used it on an adult site. But now my site is growing so much that my free webhoster will supend my site as of 17th November cause it needs to much resources on the server.

That means i have to switch to a paid host. But i am completley unsure what requirements my site has? Can i use shared hosting? Or do i need a VPS or even a dedicated server? And if so how much RAM and what CPU should these at least have? Below are some stats of my site for the past 30 days. I hope you can enlight me a little bit

Stats:
70000 Visits
1400000 Site views
45000 Unique visitors
Bandwith requirements were around 400GB

As said my site is still growing so i should have some resources left


Thanks in advance!

zabrajin

Well, from your post's info I would say forget about shared hosting, for sure. A high end VPS/dedicated server is what you should be looking for.

I would highly recommend a VPS. While a high-end shared account might suit your needs at this time, I think that given your site's growth rate, your site will soon outgrow it.

Depending on how heavy the PHP software is, I would recommend a VPS with 128-256 of dedicated RAM. Everything else is pretty basic - you'd need enough space and bandwidth to allow for growth for the next 6 months or so. I'd also suggest not to lock yourself on an any annual terms. But you can get extra savings if you go with quarterly payments.

You can always find a lot of great deals/discounts in this forum:
http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/vps...pecial-offers/

Some questions to consider. What is your growth trend? When you say exceeds their resources - are you talking about bandwidth or CPU and RAM?

my growth trend is hard to say... the site had a few days downtime every month so that broke down the whole statistic... But here is a unique visitor statistic for the past 6 months:

Oktober: 43,9k
September: 13k (seven days downtime)
August: 30k
July: 18,7k (two days downtime)
June: 17,7k
May: 13,3k


i don't now exactly what they mean with i exceeded their ressources... they just said my site generates to much traffic and is slowing down the whole server. so i guess it will be the bandwith. i registered with them nine months ago while they offered 300GB traffic. But they cut that off to 10GB for new users so i think i will be one of their users with the highest bandwith requirements xD

now i was thinking about testing a shared hosting for a few months and then switching to a vps if the shared hasting wont do it. Withouth annual billing most of the VPS are over 60$ a month and thats quite a lot for me.
Now Artashes said a high end shared hosting will suit my needs for the first time and HostLeet said i should forget it. Any other with a comment to that? ^^


best regards

zabrajin


//edit: oh, and Artashes what exactly do you mend with "high-end" shared hosting?

Your problem is that you are hosted with a free hosting provider. They tend to overload servers and usually not suited for websites as active as yours. That is why you get occasional uptime - their server indeed gets overloaded. Whether it is bandwidth or something else, we won't be able to answer.

By high-end shared hosting I meant a hosting environment in which you don't have to worry about resources being limited. There are many providers who would promise you 100s if not 1000s of GB in monthly traffic for few bucks a month, however, the moment your website starts to consume anything major, they will suspend your account for "monopolizing" server resources.

There are still a lot of companies that will be able to handle your type of traffic and bandwidth in a shared environment if the website is indeed not heavy from the point of software it runs. I do not see a critical needs for a VPS, but a shared plan might suit you at this time. You should be looking at plans that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $15-20/month for the type of traffic you require.

Check out our marketplace forum for shared hosting deals:
http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/sha...pecial-offers/

You say your website is still growing. And, from your stats it seems you get quite some traffic. I wouldn't go with any normal shared hosting if I were you (not worth the risk of moving providers again). Maybe you can try semi-dedicated hosting before you get a VPS or a dedicated server.

Semi-dedicated hosting is the exact same thing as shared hosting. The only difference is that providers that offer semi-dedicated hosting only put very few accounts per server (10-25 instead of 100's like usually). This gives you alot more resources like CPU and RAM for your website, without having to manage a server or VPS yourself. It will be a bit more expensive than regular shared hosting but it will be less than a VPS or dedicated server.

While I agree that semi-dedicated or starter VPS would be ideal in his case, his concern is price. Semi-dedicated hosting, with a respectable company and support costs at least $40/month.

Anyway, To SAve, it is wise to choose shared hosting with clustered system technology.

Don't you think ?

True.. But, I think that with the amount of traffic on the OP's website, there's no reason why he can't afford to invest a bit more money into such an important site (for the OP).

Right on the money. But then not everyone knows how to commercialize websites, especially if you are a newbie in the industry.
I know this much: if I were able to get some cash out of an adult website of this size, I wouldn't be hosting it with a free host in the first place.

I would go with a VPS or maybe multiple VPSs to break up the load, or a dedicated server. What's your budget?

This site is my first project i brought online so i'm a total newbie in making money with my site^^ Thats why i'm a little bit afraid of spending so much money for a server


The php script is not very complex, it's basicaly a simple gallery script where users can rate albums, write comments and add favorites. The heaviest thing would be my image flow which is used to view random images and which does alot of ajax requests in the background.



I'm currently brwosing the Shared-Hosting forum, looking for some offers... Meanwhile i found and interessting post within the VPS Section:

$22.72/mo for life. Powered by | Xen | Dual Nehalem | RAID10 | 15K SAS | Premium BW

The "DBD Virtual Server Series I" offer looks quite interssting for me. Anything that speaks against it?


best regards and thanks for your suggestions so far

zabrajin

In my opinion, that is actually a very good offer. 1GB of dedicated memory and 1000GB bandwidth for just 20 bucks is a great price.

What are your disk space requirements? Since it is a growing gallery, those usually take up some space. The plan above includes 25 GB of disk space, hope that is enough for you to grow.

Yes 25GB should be enough for a long time. Currently i need ~4GB for round about 22k images that are hosted in the gallery.

So i think i'll take this offer! Thanks everyone for your advise


best regards

zabrajin