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.
Comments
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.
This is a pretty old thread, but I thought I should update this - our primary servers are now located in Eau Claire, WI.
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.
They look really good, but
They look really good, but the 5/10/15GB storage limit is what would stop me, especially if I tried to host a couple of instances on one account. I'm not looking for "unlimited" like Dreamhost (DH is another story) but am currently paying $30/month for 50GB and I just hit my half way point.
Hm. I have NOT had good
Hm. I have NOT had good experience with GoDaddy. I've done a fair amount of hosting with Pair Networks (www.pair.com) and have generally positive things to say about them. Rackspace has a stellar reputation but is expensive. NeoSpire has a lot of Drupal expertise. If price is not a concern, Acquia has more Drupal knowledge in-house than any other hosting option. I haven't used Steve Hanson's service (listed above) but have only heard good things about him, so he's certainly worth considering, especially if you're looking for Wisconsin-based hosting.
Sheldon Rampton
Senior web developer, New York State Senate
http://www.nysenate.gov
http://drupal.org/user/13085
I've been using Pair Networks
I've been using Pair Networks for years now and have generally positive things to say about them also. I have two accounts (mine/client) that are on servers configured with mod_php which generally isn't a problem after increasing the memory allocation to 64-96M. My recent issue is on a third account for another client - they put me on a new server using FastCGI instead of mod_php and, even after increasing memory to 128M with php.ini, I get a ton of Internet Server Errors, even though this is a fresh D6 Pressflow instance w/ about a dozen contrib modules. I have a ticket in now to see what they can do (they already told me they can't move me to one of the older servers) so I may be looking for a new webhost myself soon.
Following up
My company is also an Acquia partner - so if you would like to talk to me about either our own Drupal hosting choices (including memcache, fcgid, varnish, and other custom hosting options) or Acquia hosting, - talk to me.
Steve Hanson
Cruiskeen Consulting LLC - http://www.cruiskeenconsulting.com
VPS.NET
I'm using VPS.NET. They are a "diamond" sponsor at Drupalcon. I use their "VPS Cloud Server." That way I can pick my own Linux distro (CentOS in my case) and configure it however I like. So if you have a preference for how Apache (or alternative) or PHP are installed, you can do it however you like. You are the server admin! Anything you can do with LAMP, you can do with VPS.NET. You can even run a mail server on your box if you want! Another nice feature of that approach is that no one at VPS.NET has access to my server because I chose to not share the root password with them. Sure, they could hack their way onto it, but without a lot of effort and ill intentions, they don't have access to it. For $54/mo ($38 for me because of the Drupalcon promo), you can get a very fast virtual server that is exclusively yours with 1.8 GHz CPU, 1.1 GB or RAM, 30 GB of hard drive space, 750 GB of data transfer per month. So it's WAY faster than what I need, and I have total control. Have a huge spike in traffic planned because of an upcoming promotion? Then temporarily scale it up to 12 GHz of virtual CPU power, 7.5 GB or RAM, 5 TB of hard disk space, etc, for only $20 a day. The only downside to VPS.NET is that they will not work if you need to meet HIPAA or FERPA standards. But then again, most hosts won't. Rackspace.com is the only "big name" I know who is HIPAA and FERPA compliant. Usually you have to go with co-location or a very specialized (and expensive) niche host if you want that. Some mom-and-pops will claim HIPAA and FERPA compliance at a low price, but then they'll drop the ball in other areas, like reliability, redundancy, support, etc. VPS.NET is like Amazon's EC2, only with easy-peasy billing and web admin. For my freelance work, it's either (a) VPS.NET or (b) co-location where I get a locked cabinet. No more shared hosting for me.