Drupal web hosting recommendations
Hi,
I'm looking for commercial hosting options for a Drupal site, and would appreciate some guidance on how much server power I might need. My experience so far is in developing relatively low-traffic sites. I'm also not an expert by any means in Linux server admin.
The site I'm developing is for a state agency, which averages @ 77,000 sessions/month, however usage ranged from a low of 23k up to a high of 244k/month. In that high month, we had more than 1 million page views. Traffic is concentrated during normal business hours. At least initially we're mostly serving pages and hosting PDFs of government forms/documents. No video. Someday we may want to incorporate a few MySQL databases.
I'd love to find a Wisconsin-based vendor, but haven't had any luck so far finding one. One vendor from Michigan I found on the Drupal web site initially suggested a dedicated server, but later said we'd be fine with VPS.
Any suggestions you folks have would be much appreciated.
Ical feed
Talk to me
I do in fact run a Drupal hosting company in Wisconsin (Menomonie). The primary servers are in Michigan though -- I've not been able to find a place to colocate in Wisconsin that is reasonably priced. We host different levels from a one-click Drupal install on a shared host to customized hosting plans on dedicated servers (though at the moment a dedicated server would take a week or so to provision since we're kind of busy). VPS's are often problematic for Drupal sites because the memory footprint of the site can be fairly big depending on the number of modules involved, etc. Anyway, reply to me at shanson@cruiskeenconsulting.com if you want to talk about options. I suspect you may want to be looking at a small dedicated server.
Steve Hanson
Cruiskeen Consulting LLC - http://www.cruiskeenconsulting.com
WiredTree Has Been Good To Me
I have a VPS with Wired Tree that is currently hosting one large-ish Drupal/CiviCRM install and a couple of other smaller installs of the same combo. They are run out of Chicago, which might be close enough for you. I am on their 768MB plan and haven't had any trouble.
You are talking about a max load of 1500 page views/hr or 25 page views/min. You many need to go with a 1GB plan to make sure you have enough RAM, but with caching enabled you should be able to do that without any trouble. It is also worth asking about burstable RAM usage. This means you pay for a smaller amount of RAM that will be fine 99% of the time, but when your server gets busy you can be allocated additional resources for a limited time.
Most VPS vendors have no problem moving your image over to a dedicated box when the time comes, so if you outgrow the VPS, moving up is very little work.
Either way make sure you go with a manged VPS or dedicated environment, or be prepared to hire someone to manage it for you. If you don't have much Linux experience it can be a lifesaver to have the support.
Quint
Rackspace cloud
Hey I would recommend you look at the Rackspace cloud option. And although setting up your Drupal site might require a little extra work it might be worth it.
My Highest Recommendation
Hello,
I have a Web dev company based in Madison, and all our servers are through North Tone Systems. (www.HostHead.com) Their office is on Fish Hatchery Road, and their data center is in the Time Warner Building in Milwaukee.
After having miserable experiences with a few large "Name Brand" companies, I stumbled across them three years ago. Working with them has been an experience unlike any other. My requests, WITHOUT FAIL, are answered within 30 minutes. Ninety percent of the time, the answer is "we've taken care of that for you."
However, every once in a while they need a few hours to handle a request. ;)
If you want the best customer service (and hosting) experience of your life, call North Tone, and ask for Brad, he's one of the owners.
There are few companies that I would stick my neck out for. NTS is one of them. They're that good.