Hosting Options For Searchable Database (Speed/Bandwidth)

[Bint Box]

Hi,

From reading a few topics it seems that although Vidahost and TSOHost are two of the frequently recommended hosting providers they seem to have some slight negatives regarding speed latency and bandwidth?

I hope to setup a MySQL database (~4gb) acting as data source for some searchable web forms that will query the database using drop down selection lists. Would anyone please be able to recommend a UK hosting provider that can offer efficient hosting for this, Simplexwebs seem to get decent feedback on the forum for this type of use?

Looking in a bit more detail at simplexwebs they offer an Enterprise hosting package @ £9.99 pcm (10gb storage, 1tb bandwidth) and a Managed VPS @ £10.99 pcm (10gb raid protected disk space, 200gb bandwidth) Could anyone please explain the difference in speed between these two packages and how the difference in bandwidth would impact on performance or user experience?




Rgds
Bintos

 

[Bint Box]

Bandwidth is a measure of how much data you can transfer, rather than how fast it is done

Any hosting package will be fine presuming the database/site is sensibly designed, but with shared hosting just ensure the database isn't larger than any limits which may be in place - large databases can impact MySQL performance in shared environments because MySQL may need to keep reading data from disk.

A virtual server should in theory be faster because MySQL only needs to hold your database in RAM.

However, if the virtual server is on a SAN, or only has a small RAM allocation, that will impact performance. You'll also need to consider management, monitoring, backups, control panel, etc, which are all usually included with a shared system. Edit: Also, the OS install will need 1 - 5Gb depending on what software is installed.

Beansprout,

Many thanks for the reply, you have pointed out an important factor that I had not considered re the size of the OS. Where the hosting packages state nGB of disk drive space I had not considered the OS in my estimates, if my MySQL database is ~3GB and the OS is ~3GB then I need to be looking at 10GB storage rather than 5GB.


Rgds
Bintos