Dedicated web server hosting – recommendations?

By ahmedbWeb Development

Hi,

Hopefully you guys can help me out with this.

I’m looking for a custom dedicated server solution that allows me to run at least a dozen WP blogs with a combined traffic of 4-5 M pageviews / month. The key here is ofcourse not the pageviews but the memory consumption that the MySQL ops cause for high-traffic blogs.

As we have several blog network owners here, hopefully one of you guys can help me make a quick and informed decision.

thanks.

14 thoughts on “Dedicated web server hosting – recommendations?”

  2. ifranky – I’ve talked to Colorteck but had no idea how expensive it would be. Nothing against them – from what I’ve heard they’re fantastic, but then again they charge accordingly.

  3. Ahmed, I appreciate that
    And it always has been my tactic too. Move the bigest site to an own server (and eventually stick the smallest site on that server too as long as possible), but in the end IMO, moving the dbases makes no sense if one site takes the majority of the traffic anyway.
    If that’s the case, that site needs to move, and while growing moving the dbase needs to to be the next option for that site then. Depending on your skills (if manaaged server, assistance of the hoster) you could consider other options once the dbase has moved again, but then we really go into geek/nerd level.

    My opinion right now is to move the most important site, especially since more and more news start to report that Google monitors and adapts ratings according to popularity/bounce rates of sites. If your site scores well, it will continue to grow, together with the number of people accessing the internet… and will soon need it’s own space.

    Get rid of the most important one, and move on as you see traffic grow. As you said before, if sites are popular, the revenue will allow you to move on to a dedicated server anyway.

    (And my tip, go Colorteck…. with your activity here at p.com the team will prioritize you… besides that, they are really involved and take any trouble ticket serious as if it were their biggest client threatening to leave)

  4. ifranky – I understand that – and I hope you’ll appreciate that I cant share full details.

    There’s one main site that gets the majority of the traffic (1.5M out of 2M, and projected 3-4M out of 3 to 5M), and that’s the one that will need a dedicated server. The rest are ok on shared hosting for now but will need to move in an year.

  5. Ahmed, at least a dozen sites delivering that amount of PVs is very vague.
    Any breakdown about how the PV are spread over those sites?

    To clarify, some sites might deliver a huge chun of the 4-5mil and actually require soon to go alone, or at least to be prepared for, as where for other sites (obscure niches) (wp) cache might be what you need and then 8-10 sites could happily reside on one server even with database. Also long term perspective for sites might be an interesting detail. If you’d like to hold on to (smaller) sites for a long term, WordPressMU could be helpful (even from WPMU blog extraction isn’t THAT hard if you’d sell one).

    IMO it is rather important to come up with a deeper analysis of the traffic before you jump to any conclusions. Also, based on experience, well serving/trafficked sites are expected always to do better (yes certain SE’s monitor clicks, especially if they have a statistics package present on that site *hint*), and in that case it just might be better to firstly put (better trafficked) 1-2 sites on an own server already, being prepared to give them both their own server.
    This would mean that even if you’d place them (only 2 sites) on an own server, you’d already give both a dedicated IP, which you can use for a future break down if those would continue to grow.

    I know, all pretty vague, but based on 4-5million PVs for (at least) a dozen of sites, I really can’t advice anything because there’s no info.

  6. split up LAMP. It’s part of the reason I liked GoDaddy hosting. I’m trying out Site5 because they have some nice deals that are fine for me, but the database isn’t separate, so I’m a bit worried.

  7. I have had nothing but success with RackSpace … so they are always my number 1 choice … however I came across a great hosting company called Softlayer in the past 3 months … so I set up a box … great 24/7 support and not to bad on the pricing … they have a great deal running right now on a Single Quad Xeon Processor Box starting at $199 per month … If you have the money … Rackspace hands down … if your on a Budget … Softlayer is waiting for your call!

    Oh yea … gotta go with the 2 box solution … mysql needs it’s own box to run that type of traffic!

    Just my 2 cents!

    Darin

  8. Another vote for rackspace, and for splitting the database away from the webserver.

  9. We moved all our stuff to a dedicated server LiquidWeb a couple of months ago. Great 24/7 phone support; very happy with them.

  11. I would go for Rackspace. IMO they can’t be beat as far as reliability and service.

  12. Cost is not always an issue – IMO if you’ve got 4-5 M pageviews going per month AdSense rev from a day or so can cover the server costs (just my opinion)

    managed hosting is useful though – unless of course I hired a webmaster (in the traditional sense of the word) for it.

  13. The best solution for database intensive sites, in my view, is to split up the LAMP.

    Have one server dedicated to LAP (LAP = LAMP minus the M)

    Have another server dedicated to M (mySQL)

    Go higher end on the M server than the LAP server if cost is an issue.

  14. I’d go with two system solution. Have one system totally dedicated to mySQL and the other system dedicated to everything else. You’re probably looking at something like 2 systems that each cost about $200 per month. Will @ Colorteck has been very helpful to me on these issues.

    Another option is to go with Mosso, but only if you don’t care about server side stats. They are a venture company of rackspace and they run a clustered server solution that puts the load across a cluster of servers instead of just 1 or 2.

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