Hosting help for a busy forum :)

Matmulder · 14 Jul 2007 at 13:22

I'm currently with Register1.net, who have been nothing short of excellent the time I've been with them. Currently using their VDS Pro package.

However they're recently contacted me to say that (basically) I'm using more than my fair share of my 'server' resources (CPU utilisation) and if I get any bigger, they'd need to dicuss how to improve their service to me.

Then then go on to recommend Dedicated Servers, and at £50pcm (assuming I pay £1700 up front) thats way too much as its funded by myself with the odd donation from members.

I just wondered if anyone had any recommendations? I'm using 50GB/month bandwidth and about 1GB of webspace, but I've got fairly high requirements for using IPB on there (currently about 50+ users at once).

Probably asking for the moon on a stick ("I want my own server, but don't want to pay for it!") but I just need something inbetween what Register1.net are offering and what I've currently got.

Looked at a few on the OcUK recommended list, but they either don't offer me enough space/bandwith or they offer dedicated servers for big ££££.

Ideas please!

furnace · 14 Jul 2007 at 13:25

Is Google Adsense an option? Then give donating members an account without adverts (give their account access to a second template, which is the same but without adverts)?

Then you could afford dedicated hosting :cool:

Matmulder · 14 Jul 2007 at 13:29

Thanks, I'll have a look into it

I didn't particularly want to go down the advertisement route, but its woth a look

joilet · 16 Jul 2007 at 13:20

I currently rent a dedicated server from Fasthosts and i am very pleased with it.

I think i pay around £100 a month and that includes unlimited bandwidth. Windows 2003 standard, eRIC remote control suite (this is excellent), 16 IP addresses.

Here are the details:

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/ds-400_windows/

You can rent much cheaper servers depending on the type of operating system. I couldn't tell from your post what platform your forum is running on. I pay the extra to get Windows 2003 standard as the web edition prevents you from installing SQL server and is restricted to either MSDE or SQL Express 2005.

I get full control even down to BIOS level through the eRIC suite. Obviously i use RDP to remote control it normally, but should you wish to control it as if you were plugged into it, then you can!

the eRIC software gives you the ability to mount floppy disks and cdrom. However from within the OS, i choose to use the Daemon virtual disc emulator to mount images of my software which i upload via FTP. I can do just as much to this server as i can with one sat right in front of me.

I've been happy with fasthosts service. The server was setup within 3 hours of payment. It was nice and clean and error free. I did experiance one problem when setting it up. I was installing the FTP service and upon adding the component, i was asked to provide the OS disc. There was an i386 folder on the server which supposedly had a copy of the discs contents, but it wasn't complete which prevented me from installing various services as part of windows. I quickly phoned up support at about 21:00 weekday evening and told them about the situation and i was told i will have to wait up to 24 hours for it to be fixed. I was dissapointed to hear that especially being a business customer. However they had done the task in less than an hour of phoning so i was pleased in the end. I've not had to speak to them since and i don't anticipate any problems providing that the network stays up and the server functions 100% hardware wise.

They're a local company to me. They are located in a large business park about 3 miles up the road. Their network backbone is providing by telewest. I use blueyonder at home and when i ping the server, it takes 10ms! Upon looking at the hops, i was pleased to see it had made 3 hops being reaching the server and all the local. The server is very quick for me. The fastest i've had it downloading was about 10MB/s from microsoft. The fastest i've experianced it upload is at about 1.2MB/s which was my maximum download speed at home. Also being local means that should things go wrong, or i get the wrong kind of treatment i'll be down there banging some heads together!

Dedicated servers are the way to go; you get so much more power and flexibility and with prices so cheap, you can easily afford to move away from shared hosting. if you use a Linux or BSD OS then prices are quite a bit cheaper. If you do go with a windows server, don't bother with the 2003 web edition! Pay the little extra to get the full version of the OS.

Hope that helps, and as a fasthosts customer i am happy with the service they provide!

Adz · 16 Jul 2007 at 21:03

IPB with 50 users online shouldn't be too intensive for a decent virtual hosting account. Have you got any mods running? If so, you might want to consider disabling them as they're often poorly coded with long, inefficient database queries.

If you want a dedicated server, you need to consider whether it will be managed or not. For your budget I'd say most likely not.

blade007 · 16 Jul 2007 at 22:22

what's the difference between managed-dedicated and non-managed dedicated?

Adz · 16 Jul 2007 at 22:37

blade007 said:
what's the difference between managed-dedicated and non-managed dedicated?

There are different levels of management depending on the company you choose but generally speaking a managed server will be configured for you by your hosting company for whatever application you require. For instance, if you want to host a website, it will be set up in a similar manner to your normal shared hosting account - you just FTP your files and go.

An unmanaged server is administered by the user - you're responsible for the services and their configuration, security, updates, etc.

blade007 · 16 Jul 2007 at 22:43

don't see why anyone except a web-guru would want un-managed - or unless you were a major reseller.

Adz · 16 Jul 2007 at 22:47

Most of our unmanaged servers go to companies with their own IT staff. They're already experienced in looking after their own in-house systems and a remote server isn't much different. We look after the hardware of course and, in the rare event of a fault, we work with their IT staff to minimise disruption.

blade007 · 16 Jul 2007 at 22:47

to OP: is there no other solution with Register1.net?- to be fair, they have really good reputation, so might be worth having another chat to see if you can be accommodated in an account upgrade rather than dedicated server. Their VDS PRo pack says "4gb space, and 200gb monthly transfer" - of course that doesn't address CPU utilisation, which might be the crunch if you have a stack of mods on your site, and in a shared enviroment it might be affecting the server as a whole.