I'm currently designing a small college newspaper site using Drupal 6. For now, it is a test site running on a shared hosting system (opensourcehost). I also run several Drupal 5 sites related to my teaching on the same account, and until now the account has managed to handle the load, which I would describe as light usage except during classes, when I can have 25 users at a time.
I am not expecting the new college newspaper site to have to handle much more than 25 concurrent users (though one never knows). But as I set up the Drupal 6 site I am experiencing a number of MySQL errors. Investigating this, I find that the MySQL limits are perhaps a bit too low:
[mysqld]
set-variable = max_connections=500
safe-show-database
old-passwords = 1
max_allowed_packet=32M
query_cache_limit = 8M
query_cache_size = 256M
max_user_connections = 490
interactive_timeout = 20
wait_timeout = 20
connect_timeout = 6
thread_cache_size = 128
key_buffer_size = 16M
join_buffer_size = 1M
table_cache = 1024
read_buffer_size = 2MIn the past, OSH has been amenable to adjusting these limits somewhat, but after some server changes in the past months, now they prohibit per-account adjustment. They suggested I consider VDS or VPS service.
The obvious solution--to have my sites installed on a college server--won't work; the tech staff here, understandably perhaps, don't want to allow for a drupal installation for security reasons.
The OSH shared account has some important features for me, most notably assisted install/update of the Drupal core. If I were to go the VDS/VPS route, I would need to get assistance at least with the initial site install, but also with tuning the MySQL and other server options for the site, and perhaps even with upgrading the Drupal core now and then. A support-free VDS/VPS account would probably be a bad idea for me.
I've dug into the discussions at drupal.org on hosting issues. They are often useful, but all too often also seem promotional or otherwise biased, so I thought I would turn to the NOD group in hopes of benefiting from the experience of members.
My question for this group: Given my requirements and my level of experience (I am an entirely self-taught drupal site manager with limited experience, through cPanel and PHPmyadmin, at running the back end), what suggestions would you offer me on how to proceed and what to look for. Anything from general advice to specific hosting suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
Comments
Low-budget option: one.com
Hi
I've been using one.com for web hosting for some time now. They too have quite sparse memory limits, but a quick comparison made me think they give more per dollar/euro than OpenSourceHost.
I've used one.com for two quick projects with journalism students (http://alfatidningen.se/ and http://betatidningen.se/), and it works reasonably well. However, on my personal site (http://johanfalk.net) I run Drupal 6 and not 5, and this quickly becomes more than one.com can handle.
If you want to stay low-budget and Drupal 5, one.com might be an option. Otherwise, it's not.
(Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you're considering one.com - I've had some issues using images, for example.)
//Johan Falk, Sweden
Thanks, Johan. I'm
Thanks, Johan. I'm definitely making the turn to Drupal 6, so from what you say one.com may not work for me. Also sounds, then, as if you know something about version six requiring more resources than version 5. This is what I am experiencing now, but I had not read anything so far about that requirement at drupal.org or anywhere else.
Memory requirements
I too was surprised that Drupal 6 seemed to require more memory than Drupal 5. From what I've heard, it should be quicker and leaner - which I assumed meant requiring less memory. However, my experiences says otherwise.
My memory problems might be caused by installed modules, and if so Views 2 is my prime suspect. However, I can't really imagine running a site without Views (or CCK for that matter), so in practical terms it seems the memory requirement has gone up.
I suppose Drupal 6 still can be quicker and leaner - even if it requires more memory - but I don't run sites big enough to tell the difference.
//Johan Falk, Sweden
I am running into memory
I am running into memory problems with both Views2 and CCK (though I am not sure whether the problem is CCK core or one of the associated CCK sub modules). I consider these "must have" modules, so cannot really cut back to Drupal6 core.
Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, MySQL errors (at least the ones I am receiving) do not specify the source of the problem within Drupal. This makes it difficult (for me, at least) to figure out any adjustments within Drupal that might help--all I am left with is trying to get a bigger memory allotment.
Frederick Emrich