Web Hosting - For large site (Up to 1m views/day)

GaryH-21

GaryH-21

GaryH-21

Associate
Joined
6 May 2011
Posts
470
Hi guys,

I'm researching web hosting solutions for a large website.

The website usually gets around 20k-30k page views per day (around 1 million per month), however this can jump up dramatically - We have had days with 700k views.

I've looked at hosting with:
Scolocate
Pulsant
Rackspace
Azure
Amazon
Hetzner
Vidahost (as highly recomended on here)

Ideally I would like 2, maybe 3 servers - A development server that I can break, A staging server to check everything out before it goes live, and the production server running the live website.

I will need Windows Server 2003 or 2008 (IIS & .NET 4)
Database will run on MSSQL 2005 or above.


What else should I take in to consideration, and are there any companies I should be looking at (Preferably UK based companies, even though I listed some outside of the UK)

Thanks
 
I can't answer many of your questions but I use TSOHOST which are I think a UK company. They normally get recommended around here a lot too so worth checking out.
 
I work for one of the companies listed above so I'd recommend giving the Sales line a call and explaining your requirements. You'll get a lot of help!
 
Ringiho said:
I work for one of the companies listed above so I'd recommend giving the Sales line a call and explaining your requirements. You'll get a lot of help!
Click to expand...

I'm waiting to hear back about our current disk usage, database size and bandwidth usage, then I have a meeting next week and then we'll start the process of contacting providers

I can't answer many of your questions but I use TSOHOST which are I think a UK company. They normally get recommended around here a lot too so worth checking out.
Click to expand...

I checked out Tsohost too, but couldn't see any dedicated / virtual servers

Thanks guys.
 
If you can design it properly (or pay somebody to) then AWS (Amazon) is a good option at this sort of scale. Beyond that it depends what sort of support you want, if you want top quality support and 'managed' style hosting then avoid the little companies and speak to Peer1 or Rackspace (Peer1 are my favorite currently).

Just tell them the numbers though, that isn't 'large' for any decent hosting company. Assuming you see all of your hits in a 12 hour window (so not much overnight) then 30k a day is less than 1 a second, 700k is still only 16 a second. You don't even need any special optimization to run that on one server.
 
So having checked the figures myself, it appears we didn't get 700,000 VIEWS... we got 700,000 hits... with around 230,000 views.... and we get around 7,000 views a day (30,000ish hits).... DOH

Not quite as busy as I first thought then :p

Thanks for your comment, big red - made me think about it and it seems a lot more manageable than I first thought!

I'll check Peer1 out!
 
bigredshark said:
If you can design it properly (or pay somebody to) then AWS (Amazon) is a good option at this sort of scale.
Click to expand...

Amazon is great if you have in house sysadmins/devops, otherwise most normal people are going to struggle to leverage what it can offer successfully. Performance (especially disk i/o) can also be an issue, so what could normally be achieved with a few well specified physical machines ends up requiring dozens of high mem/CPU instances on Amazon, with their associated costs.

Beyond that it depends what sort of support you want, if you want top quality support and 'managed' style hosting then avoid the little companies and speak to Peer1 or Rackspace (Peer1 are my favorite currently).
Click to expand...

I'm surprised you've recommended Rackspace - they're certainly not as good as their marketing makes them out to be. No experience with Peer1 though.

Pulsant's managed hosting is based on their acquisition of Dedipower, which by all accounts is pretty decent.
 
We use rackspace, iomart and lumison - now pulsant. The latter has gone through a lot of growth very fast, and I'm not sure if they are coping with the integrations, we have had a few outages from them. RS is normally quite pricey where as iomart is not bad. Really it comes down to budget.
 
daz said:
I'm surprised you've recommended Rackspace - they're certainly not as good as their marketing makes them out to be. No experience with Peer1 though.

Pulsant's managed hosting is based on their acquisition of Dedipower, which by all accounts is pretty decent.
Click to expand...

I don't recommend backspace as such, but they have a comprehensive product range and benefit from scale massively. While they aren't as good as their marketing suggests I agree they do have the advantage of being big enough to have somebody who knows about every conceivable solution.

It depends what you want, if it's a simple site with moderately high traffic levels then I'd stick with Rackspace/Peer1, they know how to most really busy websites, it's nothing new. If you go with somebody small then you'll be a bigger customer and may get more attention but they'll have less experience of hosting busy sites and will probably be technically less able.

Choosing hosting is hard. Big players do well because they know they're stuff already and have done it all before, they loose out on support usually. Small players are something of a lottery with how much they know, they usually do well on support but whether that'll stay as they grow (if they grow) is a big question. I've worked for companies which have acquired a lot of small hosting companies, in general they tend to loose a lot of customers straight after because the support they offer isn't scalable and economic.

I don't know what will happen with Dedipower and pulsant. The pulsant acquisition was fuelled by Pulsant's acquisition themselves by private equity, which is generally never a sign of anything good for customer service and the like. Expect them to become very rackspace like in the future.

I have a business interest in Peer1 but I also seriously rate them, everybody there I've met is extremely capable and they're new UK datacenter is a work of art. I've seen Pulsant and Peer1 DC's and the comparison is shocking.
 
Thanks for the help everyone.

I put together a proposal for a list of different companies mentioned - I think we're going to end up at one of the data centres near here!
 
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