Posted by anthonyoliver on January 23, 2007 at 2:45pm
I was curious if anyone has this host, I was curious as to if it's worth paying for the service or not. I notice they have one click installs of drupal. I currently have dreamhost which is a good host but the Grid Service media temple provides is quite inticing espically considering it isn't a whole lot more than what I pay for dreamhost.
Comments
Not bad
I have a legacy client on MT and after a bumpy start -- they were still very much in beta, it seems -- it overall has worked out. This client had problems with shared hosts, and the gridservers seem to be handling the occasional traffic spikes quite well. We've also seen an overall trend towards improved performance and reduced server load.
I would not recommend it for any mission-critical sites, obviously, but for the hobby site, MT seems okay for Drupal.
Laura
pingVision, LLC
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
Awesome, thanks for the
Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. Yeah I personally never have had a problem with Dreamhost being down. But I'm in the process of starting a web developer business and I don't want my clients sites going down because I know they'll be at my neck.
http://xamox.NET
Laura could you comment again on MT?
I appreciate your post and am considering MT. It has been 9 months since your post and I am curious if you would make another comment? Have things worked out or is there another direction that I should consider?
Thank you in advance and in closing I want to encourage newbies to your site so they can start thinking outside the box.
http://www.pingv.com/ is a great site. Very unique design. Clean, bright, and easy to navigate.
Peace.
"Life is a fast strange trip, good thing we all have seats" (author unknown)
Look elsewhere
The above comment is still spot-on.
MT is appropriate for a hobbyist site, not appropriate for business use. Downtime is too frequent. The problem with grid hosting is that when the grid goes down, everyone's site goes down. Grid hosting is a great concept and is possibly the future of hosting, but right now, nobody has it right. After being with them for a while after the move to grid hosting, I'm convinced that it will probably take another 2 years before grid hosting (from any company) becomes reliable enough to use.
Our experience is that sites
Our experience is that sites on MT still perform rather slowly rather consistently. One of our developers has his blog on another host using a grid and has had better luck, but it escapes me at the moment what that company is. Our operations manager also had what sounds like a good experience with a gridserver setup he managed at his previous job. So I wouldn't say that the problem with MT is gridservers in general, but rather you get what you pay for. Grid hosting at shared hosting prices is going to perform like shared hosting.
Laura
pingVision, LLC
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
Thanks for the Host Info
Dustin - thanks - I know I am not the only person who will appreciate this info. I am looking at VPN through MT, any chance you have a comment on that service?
Thanks again - peace.
"Life is a fast strange trip, good thing we all have seats" (author unknown)
Media Temple Dedicated Virtual Server
We use MT's DV server on a regular basis for us and our clients and we find the service to be great. Out of the box though, additional configuration is needed for the dv server. As configured out of the shoot, MT's Dv server just has too much overhead. I can't find the original article I used to minimize the native overhead but a quick google revealed a plethora of configuration suggestions to help minimize this. I do have to say though, that MT's technical support is amazing. Anything from simple issues or questions to fatal mistakes on my behalf. They will do what ever it takes. I can even call them and get the same quality support that I would through the account center, which is something amazing compared to previous hosts I have used. While I do most of my crucial administration through terminal the MT account center is simple and easy to use, giving you access to just about anything you would need to configure. The DV server uses plesk for server administration which is ok I guess, much better than cpanel. MT provides ssh on all servers I believe and with the DV server at least you can gain root access. I find that alone a potential deciding factor.
Peace,
-mpare
Pare Technologies
Drupal Consulting, Themeing, and Module Development
806.781.8324 | 806.733.3025
www.paretech.com
Figure Something Out? Document Your Success!
Peace,
-mpare
Pare Technologies
Drupal Consulting, Themeing, and Module Development
806.781.8324 | 806.733.3025
www.paretech.com
Figure Something Out? Document Your Success!
MT is appropriate for a
Would you say the same for MT dv servers? I'm about to switch from share hosting to them, is the downtime you were talking about just in grid hosting or also their dedicated servers? If you think I'd probably be better off with another provider, do you ave any suggestions?
--
Nicolas
Easy Speedy ES3020
I am happy with the service. Had some power bumps about 5 months ago. We carry almost 200 domains so at 90 euros it works out to less than $1 per month per domain.
You might ask mfer about it
mfer mentioned MT on one of his GeeksAndGod podcasts.
I recently checked it out myself, because the idea of redundant servers for a small monthly fee is very enticing to me (after a recent outage), but I don't know about how their service is, and that would be more important to me.
Also, another thing to note is that their Drupal one-click install is still currently only 4.7.3.
Having used both, I can
Having used both, I can definitely say that MT's grid server is way faster than DH. It's not even close in that regard. As far as support goes, DH seems to respond more quickly to emails, but MT tends to fix the problem more quickly. And the only sort of problems experienced at MT have been sites being unable to access the mysql databases, whereas DH is more likely to have problems with whole sites being down. Just got an email saying they were rolling out a new version, so hopefully those problems will be a thing of the past.
I also tried the one-click install once and it was stupid easy - but it's only good if you don't want to use 5.1.
Arp Laszlo
http://www.inkwire.net
Arp Laszlo
@arphaus
www.echoleaf.com / design / theming / front end development
Yeah, everyone has told me
Yeah, everyone has told me dreamhost is a lot slower because mysql servers are located in a different place. I have been pretty disappointed with them lately.
http://xamox.NET
I have http://mon.itor.us/
I have http://mon.itor.us/ keeping an eye on a couple of sites and over the last week there have been several instances of downtime - 3 of them yesterday. I'll be moving all live sites off dh and keep the hosting for testing until the contract runs out. Apparently, you do get what you pay for. My next thing would be to find a cheaper domain registrar than MT.
Arp Laszlo
@arphaus
www.echoleaf.com / design / theming / front end development
Awesome! Thanks for that
Awesome! Thanks for that website link. I think I'll be switching hosting providers too. Their service has seem to go to shit for me the past few months and I can not have these type of issues with clients. I couldn't even access the panel the other day when I severely needed to.
http://xamox.NET
Beware!
The Grid Server has had a lot of problems over the past month an a half. Check out this link to see the horrible lag times: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-Ab3UaY590VDhZCTaDinHg
Version 1.2 of the Grid introduced MySQL containers which has improved things greatly. If MT can straiten things out this will be the best hosting deal on the web IMO but for now I'd be very cautious.
Rick
Alright, thanks for the
Alright, thanks for the heads up. Like I said I currently have dreamhost but have kind of been disappointed with them lately, they have been having a lot of problems and my sites have a very slow response time which I can't have for customers. So I've been considering alternatives, if anyone has them I would greatly appreciate it.
You can see all the problems dreamhost has been having at:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com
http://xamox.NET
MT Experience
I use MT grid to create quick mockup sites for clients, and for my own projects
If you have a client that needs solid hosting, use MT's http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/ (or another reputable VPS0. The client should understand that reliable hosting costs more (not much more, really)
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Blog
Sam Rose
Hollymead Capital Partners
P2P Foundation
Social Media Classroom
Thanks for the Host Info
Glad to get this info. Was hoping the company was solid so really appreciate the feedback. Thanks!
"Life is a fast strange trip, good thing we all have seats" (author unknown)
Grid Hosting Comparison
I've looked at mediatemple and also at hostingplex are there any other grid/cluster companies to compare?
http://netpaths.net
Media temple is a good
Media temple is a good company.
My experience is that these gridhosts are not so great for mission critical sites. I use them now mostly for flatfile Perl wiki farms, which seem to work quite well even under heavy load. Media temple and other grid hosts usually work well, but when they crash, they crash hard and long. Just too experimental and unreliable for a database-backed system like Drupal, IMO.
I have started moving my Drupal development pretty much exclusively to VPS services. Partially because of relaibility, and partially because of the control you have with root access to the machine.
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
Sam Rose
Hollymead Capital Partners
P2P Foundation
Social Media Classroom
MediaTemple (gs) + Zend Optimizer?
I'm shopping around for better hosting due to overall slowness & increasingly exceeding memory limits where I'm at now, and have been looking at MediaTemple's grid service for low to medium traffic sites.
I've read a lot of reports that the MT(gs) service has performance issues of its own, but no mention of whether or not folks experiencing those performance issues are using Zend optimizer or not, which I understand is available and configurable on MT(gs)???
I understand database performance is another issue for folks on this service, and MT has come up with some new approaches to improving MySQL performance... but I wouldn't be too excited about doubling or tripling the base gridservice price point, just to get decent database performance?! :\ I could just go dedicated or VPS if that becomes the case.
Another question: Any recommendations for other good drupal-ready hosts that offer Zend optimizer or other PHP optimizers (eAccelerator, APC, XCache)?
Thx
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
--
matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
Media temple stuff
For what it is worth I am having a fairly good run with a media temple split system:
I found the GS just couldn't handle our drupal site, even in dev (read 2 users testing)
The split environment was a breeze to setup. The only difficulties I am having is drupal email messages sent to the same domain don't make through.
Also, I found I was able to have the "managed" os stuff still active in conjunction with root access to the DV. I was mainly trying to keep avoid making my client have to pay for an admin.
One note, I found the DB container on the GS to have no effect, and possibly actually be worse (seemed to be more fail to connect to DB errors) .
Anyway: 4000 general sessions a day - mostly not logged in, plenty of modules (including memory suckers like event, image, image cache), 2 months on the split GS DV , seems to be working out pretty well.
On big caveat, I was having some max DB packet size issues when I first transferred over. I requested root, upped the memory settings, and that resolved.
good luck
Will Kirchheimer
Will Kirchheimer
I'm not happy with MT
Neither grid nor DV seem to perform adequately. I'm a big fan of barebones VPS accounts. Rimuhosting and Slicehost seem the most talked about, I ended up choosing Rimuhosting.
Agreed
Agreed. VPS is the way to go, apart from special cases (e.g. a site is mainly accessed by anonymous users, and you install boost)
I have also tried both Slicehost and Rimuhosting. Both have good support. There are cheaper VPSes out there, but no support.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
mediatemple dv recommended?
Hi,
I'm confused by the more recent comments on this thread. Is mediatemple dv (http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/) recommended?
I am looking for hosting for a drupal 6/civicrm 2.2 site, and have been told mediatemple is a good choice. stories/recommendations most welcome.
Thanks!
Tobias
Media Temple (GS) Performance...
I've been hosting my personal website and most of my development work on GS for a while. Initially it was very rocky and it has improved over time. One of the apparent bottle necks is the shared SQL environment. I saw a big improvement by adding a dedicated mysql container. I'm not going to say it will be as snappy as a dedicated server or even DV, but it is much better than GS's shared mysql option.
Cheers... Somewhere I've also got a writeup on getting bzr running on GS, if you like that kind of stuff.
Hello, Its 2009 now.. Anyone
Hello,
Its 2009 now..
Anyone have insight on Drupal 6 or 7 working on Media Temple (mt) shared hosting services (gs)?
I have my current Drupal websites on a different shared host and everything has been working well, for quite some time now. But Media Temple's offer of 100 gigs space is too good to pass.
2009...MT is still truckin?
I have helped a few clients who are on Media Temple.
They had great phone support and responded to trouble tickets quickly. The technicians I worked with were Drupal/Web 2.0 aware.
From what I have read and used....Media Temple has a good VPS product in a decent data center. Prices are pretty good too.
Improvements?
Checking in.
Is Media Temple's GS service still running too slow for production sites?
development
i'm in the final stages of testing my first drupal 6 site on mediatemples (gs), its been ok, bearing in mind I have devel rebuilding the cache every page load. a few mysql fails, and its generally not the fastest experience in the world but I think people have got it right. the mysql shared service is probably the bottleneck from what i can tell. will try and remember to post an update after a month or so once the site gets some use and i get some feedback.
I've been running on gs for a
I've been running on gs for a while now. It works ok but I still experience lags in the admin panel specifically and figured time to upgrade to a dv.
Abysmal performance
Currently struggling with severe performance issues w/ D6 on MT GS. I'm sure it's the database connectivity, because I've done everything I can on the Drupal side and there's no improvement.
Generally my feelings about MT are quite negative. Their control panel is great at giving the illusion of power, but it's really difficult to use. phpMyAdmin login is using one of the database IDs that you create (first time I've ever seen that, and not documented as far as I can tell). The "sales consultants" I've talked with on the phone have been bullshit artists. They claim to require that they control your DNS records, which is kind of unacceptable to me especially given how difficult I've found it to get someone there on the phone.
So, from my perspective, they are all hat and very few cattle.
My take on (mt)
There is a huge bottleneck on the database side.
If you/your client is concerned enough, you can purchase a gridcontainer which should give you a big boost. We recently added a 256mb container and the site sprang to life. It's not cheap, but moving servers isn't cheap either.
Some of our other smaller sites run pretty well on (mt) but there are still mysql errors once in awhile. That is even more frustrating because the client just can't understand why it just "happens".
On a side note, Wordpress runs pretty well on (mt). It's a shame they can't do the same for Drupal.
I've seen the container
I've seen the container advice before and from a logistical standpoint, that's what makes sense for them -- they have 5 production sites on MT (I only work with one of those) and use it for some business functions. Glad to have more feedback that it might actually help.
Just wanted to add my
Just wanted to add my experiences here.
I've got two clients, one on a dv and another on a gs. Both have had performance problems, though the dv is MUCH better. In my opinion, both setups are adversely affected by phantom resource contstraints: You can optimize Drupal and (on the dv) Apache and MySQL until you are blue in the face, and you will still be plagued (occasionally) by mysterious high server load averages and slow database access.
On the DV, we have periods of unexplained CPU load. Nothing on the server seems to be consuming much CPU by itself, and yet the whole machine slows to a crawl, and the site goes unavailable for a few minutes. I have struggled immensely with this problem for almost a year now. However in the last 3 or 4 months, the problem seems to have vanished (not through any manipulation on my part). But this is the way it goes. It's absolutely great for months, and then we have a period of mysterious resource shortages. While MT support is, indeed, among the best I've seen, this is one problem they never seem to be able to fix, partly because it's intermittent, and you can never get them to catch it in the act while it's happening.
The problem on the GS I suspect is much more fundamental, and I would add to the opinions of the others here who see it as not really appropriate for a mission-critical, business-critical site. We don't get CPU issues here - in this case, it's just random slowness, especially when logged in as an admin for some reason. You see it if you use the devel module to display query times. A page might take 30 seconds or more to load, and almost all of that time will show up as being consumed by the query. And yet it's not a query that should take that long. The same query will take almost no time ten minutes later.
To me, this points clearly to the shared database resources being hogged by some other user temporarily. Media Temple makes claims about isolating you from those problems, and guaranteeing you your "slice" of database performance, but I don't really think they can.
MT's preferred solution for slow queries
MT's preferred solution to this type of database issue seems to be for you to buy a MySQL Grid Container. A client asked us to look into this some months back, and we did, and this is what we finally came around to. It does seem to help a little, but it seems to me to point to a fundamental weakness of their grid architecture.
I don't know, but it might point to a weakness in grid architectures in general. I would defer to a server guru on that.
Don't spread FUD.
"I don't know, but it might point to a weakness in grid architectures in general. I would defer to a server guru on that."
If you don't know what you're talking about don't comment. There is no better way to spread misinformation than talking out your #@$!%....
If I had to take a guess, as the administrator of my own cloud infrastructure... VM environments are typically disk i/o constrained. SQL is typically disk i/o constrained. The shared SQL running on VMs providing service for hundreds of VMs is likely to be extremely disk i/o constrained. It's possible each grid container has dedicated i/o access, or at least less subscribed disks and dedicated cpu and memory... This means your query cache is yours, your processor cycles are yours, and hopefully you have a little more disk i/o in your basket...
The grid platform is built around a concept of extreme fault tolerance, not high performance...
If you want high performance get a dedicate server with 14 6gig Sata SSD disks in a RAID 0 configuration and enough ram to put your entire database in memory 3 times over while the system is running... Then you'll have a fast sql db server... A modest processor should get the job done admirably for most Drupal style loads. There isn't a lot of OLAP style queries crunching numbers in select clauses. Mostly just straight ask for data...
Read and understand the damn qualifiers
so, you're supporting my assertion and telling me not to spread FUD?
I know enough about technology to know that when you have files and SQL servers on separate hardware arranged in a grid, you have to do something special to make sure the performance doesn't suck. I was just giving someone like you the space to come in and correct that -- and you chose to do it by trying to make me look like an idiot. Instead, you could have simply stated your case (which, as I read it, is basically that we're fools for expecting decent performance out of a grid on database-driven applications).
I'm not necessarily supporting your assertion...
"a fundamental weakness of their grid architecture." It's unfair to single out Media Temple in this regard. I don't think it's a fundamental limit of their grid architecture. You're running into a general limitation of shared sql environments (poor caching performance, disk i/o over subscription) in conjunction with the overheads of virtualization.
You are a fool if you expect to have a solid site hosted on a discount bin 20/mo gs account. If your site is brochure ware with a few basic sql backed widgets it would be an option.
Drupal is a horrific from a database perspective. The number of queries required to generate a page are ridiculous. Once you include CCK, Views, and a few of those 'crucial' flexible modules you need a dedicated database instance to back your site. It's critical that you have control over mysql's caching behavior and to a lesser extent the file system's caching/buffering behavior.
The best value host I've found for small Drupal sites looking to squeeze the most performance out of the smallest budget is slicehost.
My current formula runs along the lines of
1 512M slice, webserver
- ubuntu server minimal + apache2 + mod_php + apc + memcache
1 256M slice, database server
- ubuntu server minimal + mysql 5 + basic mysql tuning.
I run 5 applications on that setup with 20-30 concurrent active authenticated users each without complaints. Your mileage may vary based on how well you optimize your code. You can also begin to scale by setting up more web servers and your favorite flavor of load balancing and scale your site horizontally or vertically as you see fit.
You might also consider softlayer they have a very strong offering as well.
The options I propose require take on the administration yourself, but a one time fee of 500USD will normally get this type of environment put together for you. There are a number of reputable systems administrators in the drupal community who would make quick work of such a setup for you.
I wouldn't recommend myself. If you haven't noticed I'm a snarly curmugdeon and I may bite.
Okaaaaaay.....
Wow. Not even going to touch the acrimony in dopry's post. But his basic point seems to be borne out by what most people's experience has been (and by common sense): You get what you pay for. High performance is really the domain of dedicated servers, and it costs more.
But the real focus of this thread seems to have been: Are Media Temple's grid server hosting accounts appropriate for business web sites that need high availability? My experience tells me no. You probably need to spend a bit more if you're serious about a business web site. I certainly wouldn't recommend a gs plan to any of my clients.
It's like any range of products: the gs is a price point that makes sense for a certain segment of MT's customers. If you're going to make your income from your web site (i.e., you business IS your web site), I don't think you're in that segment.
The Grid is very very very BAD
The higher cost of the (gs) even with the rails and sql containers (that double and triple the price) is not worth it. Nearly any big low-end shared hosting will beat it in every possible way, most importantly uptime and query response time.
I have used 3 grid accounts since 2008 and am finally getting loose. There are sooo many problems, but the latency is the most steady aggravation. Just do a little searching and you will find plenty of similar stories, MT's own admission of the core problems long ago, and some savvy technical analyses from a few ex-customers.
You will also see that I have posted this type of commentary in other places over the past year or so. I am really disturbed by MT's persistent selling of this broken service when it's bad beer in a fancy micro-brew bottle. The successor that fixes all the problems has been coming along forever, it took to this year to get MySQL5, initially they suggested everyone would get an SQL container and then they decided to upsell those in support requests about lost database connections... there were the big security breaches, unencrypted root user passwords stolen, call center phones going down, just an endless parade of disasters behind a slick "we are rockstars" front for a service that can't begin to compete with the likes of a Godaddy, Siteground, Hostgator, Bluehost, etc. I don't recommend them either, but they will work for you far better than the (gs) at 1/4 the price.
Here's my longish review back earlier this year when I was still trying to believe in MT. The uptime and latency graphs say it all: http://www.newlocalmedia.com/blog/107-host-review-media-temple.html
Dan Knauss
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/danknauss
New Local Media :: www.newlocalmedia.com
Have to agree
I have to agree with Dan now completely. I can't believe MT gets away with charging $20/month for what clearly has no better performance than a $7/month service. And I'm also starting to agree with the notion that they are a "slick facade" on a pretty shabby service. The people are friendly, but the technology ranges from downright terrible to just plain acceptable.
I've heard good things about Pair Networks' High Volume accounts. It's shared hosting, but they drastically limit the number of customers on a hardware node compared to normal shared hosting.
If anybody has used one of these, I'd love to know how well it works.
Good experience with (dv)
I've had good experience with a (dv) running 6 drupal sites, 1 wp site and 2 non-cms sites. I will say that these are extremely simple brochure web sites, but I have never experienced serious/consistent latency in any aspect (site management or viewing, logged in or not).
(dv) Grid Service for Drupal, no. For other CMS, yes.
I think a big part of it has to do w/ Drupal's huge messy database structure (especially views) as Dopry metioned. I've been running a lot of Joomla and WordPress sites on MediaTemple's GS service and they've worked fantastic, even when hosting multiple sites on the same GS account. However, putting a Drupal site on the GS has been miserable. As someone else mentioned, turning on Devel has shown horribly long query and page build times. Granted, I haven't been able to get much better on our local LAN with a split between my Apache and MySQL servers, so I won't lay the blame here entirely on MediaTemple.
We're about to launch a Drupal site on the DV, so I'm crossing my fingers that it's worth the price.
Yeah, I agree that the
Yeah, I agree that the database load in a Drupal site is huge. So much so that database performance is my number 1 priority when shopping for web hosts for clients. But here's the key fact for me: Drupal performance on a $20/month GS account is no better than Drupal performance on a $7/month shared host elsewhere. Often it's worse, in fact. Neither are good, mind you, but one costs three times as much. Maybe for some folks there are features at MT that they like that make it worth the extra money. But I see nothing (for my money) in a GS account that would make it worth the extra money.
You'll probably get acceptable performance from your DV, however - I'm not exactly thrilled with mine, but it's not terrible, either.
Drupal is a database hog, sure, but there seem to be huge differences between different hosts in how that database load is handled. Even huge differences between similarly-priced plans at different hosts. It's really tough to know before you sign up for a plan just how fast your queries will return. I'm about to move a client from a GS account to a Pair Networks account (one of their $80/month "high volume" plans). The experience should be illustrative. I have no idea if it's going to really solve their page load speed issues, but we have to try something. Hopefully I can post some results here once that's done.
Good luck with your launch.
I have many sites on
I have many sites on MediaTemple's DV's and they all perform quite well. In my experience, performance of the GS left much to be desired.
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
Well, the results are in. The
Well, the results are in. The DV has worked admireably for the past 6 months hosting a fairly heavy Drupal site with back-end image and PDF processing.
However, I just did a speed test of Drupal on MediaTemple's Grid Service vs. Bluehost. The GS, even with the newer MySQL 5 and Drupal 7 performed miserably.
I was considering MT GS for a
I was considering MT GS for a Drupal website. Can anyone define what is considered "high volume" and/or "medium/high traffic" sites? It's easier for me to understand in terms of visitors/day, but bandwidth is probably a more accurate measurement.
A client that I did a Drupal website for last year needs to move their website since we decided to try GoDaddy shared hosting which turned out to be a nightmare. So I need to do my homework this year around. Typically they get around 200-500 unique visits per day, but leading up to the day of their event, it can be anywhere between 1500-3000. GoDaddy was a nightmare in terms of speed the pages were being served and "whitescreening" due to Internal 500 errors and/or CGI errors that their customer support would say would happen. You would actually have to phone them up to get the website out of this state in some cases. Their "preview mode" they have so that you can see the website before the domain has been repointed was also an issue, since they use mootool scripts to display the website and you have to implement jQuery.noConflict(); in Drupal.
I've had decent success with most of my Drupal sites on Hostgator shared hosting, but this is with traffic under 200 visitors/day.
I guess I'm just looking for advice on good hosting companies and what package is best for the level of traffic? I guess you get what you pay for but clients always want to take the cheapest route.
educate your clients
The (gs) is broken. Don't use it for ANYTHING.
Currently good shared hosting will hold up a reasonably configured and optimized Drupal site with 800-1200 uniques/day. Beyond that the good ones will start telling you to scale up to a different plan.
So it sounds like you need to educate your clients who have high traffic spikes that they need to pay for hosting that can handle that.
If you and they don't want the trouble of managing a virtual server then maybe a CDN would be cost effective or some of the "cloud"/"redundant" type hosting offered by Site5. I am very pleased with their hosting and customer service. You can ask them directly what they have in their lower-tier plans that might be adequate for you.
Dan Knauss
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/danknauss
New Local Media :: www.newlocalmedia.com
My company has a client
My company has a client hosting on Bluehost (not an endorsement, just an example) who get in the 800-1600 per day range and they report no issues. When I visit their site to do maintenance, I routinely see 20-30 user sessions; site performance is usually fine. HOWEVER, most of those users hit the home page and move on: They're a bank, and the most common usage profile you see on bank websites is people hitting the home page and immediately leaving to login to their online account management.
Point being, it's important to know what those spikes represent. If they represent users logged-in to Drupal, or people using webforms or ecommerce, then yes, you most likely need something more than the usual shared hosting. (FWIW, there are shared hosting vendors out there that claim to be able to handle spikes better. I'm skeptical of those, since I've had a bad experience with one. Hostgator in my experience seems to handle them as well as anyone.)
VPS is getting to be a decent deal. For most places, if you want CPanel style management, VPS is going to run you in the neighborhood of $50/month. That sounds like a big deal when you compare it to shared hosting, but if you total it out ($700/year) it's not that big a deal for most medium-sized or even small businesses -- it's likely a good deal less than they pay for garbage pickup, it's a fraction of the annual phone bill, etc. Plus it gives you much more freedom in configuring the site to deal with things like the fact that their mail is most likely somewhere else. (Caveat: It also means you have more responsibility for configuring things, and you need to more thoroughly test stuff like your mail routing -- especially from the webserver into the client's domain.)
Disclaimer: CiviHosting is my
Disclaimer: CiviHosting is my company.
I would recommend you look at CiviHosting. We host sites with numbers like yours and they run beautifully. I can also share that we have transferred clients from GoDaddy, HostGator and MediaTemple due to performance complaints with those firms. They have all been happy with our performance and service.
If I can answer any questions about our services, please contact me offline.
Thank you.
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