Need Server good for a Blog with 50,000 Uniques a day and Growing

Hello everyone, love the site (although my post count is low)

I ran into some problems with my current hosting company *cough*superb hosting*cough* which they have done a terrible job.

I am using a dedicated server, but my site takes around 1 minute to start loading,

I was wondering, is there any hosting company's that "thrive" for blogs, like set up?

But, I do need a dedicated server.

Please, your help is most appreciated.

Thanks,

 

My website gets around 80,000 hits an hour, and it runs on:
Core2Duo E6600
4GB RAM
250GB SATAII HDD
100MBps

Providing you tweak the web server you use correctly (I would suggest Apache or IIS, depending on what OS you wish to go with), a similar setup to the above should work fine.

(For the record, I use cPanel/Apache on Cent OS 5.x)

 

59K uniques per day, it's not very big number. What kind of blog do you have? How about your server hardware / software? Do you know anything about server management?

 

Thanks,
This is what I am currently running:

Operating Systems

* CentOS
* Ubuntu
* Fedora
* FreeBSD
* Windows 2003 Std (+$25)
* Windows 2003 Web (+$15)


Data Center & Network

* 100% network uptime guarantee
* 99.9% server uptime guarantee
* Zero packet loss guarantee

CPU Class Woodcrest E5130
CPU 2 x Xeon 2.0 GHz
Cache / FSB 2 x 4096 / 1033
RAM 2GB RAM
Hard Drive 320GB SATA
Monthly Traffic 2000GB
Starting Price $279/m

And these add ons:

• Additional 2GB RAM - 4GB total

• Unlimited 10Mb/s port

• Linux-based Firewall Service

• 100 Mb/s network port upgrade

Is there anything I should change?

Thanks,

 

I believe you don't have any server management experience huh
For that kind of hardware, I doubt you will have such slow. Should be something wrong with network or server software. Have you tried to make a traceroute between your computer and server when it's running slowly?

 

No, I have not.
I do not know much about "Server Management", and I have no idea what a trace route is, I apologize, I am just not too experienced with the server side

I hope I can stay with this company, and hope not switch servers

 

the server is good but is the server managed?
coz if you dont know management, then there could be problems in future which can take your site down.

 

I dont know,
I do not think so, how could i find out

 

you can ask your host. most probably, it would be unmanaged.

 

I'm with superb hosting and I think they are pretty good.

The first thing I would change in your case is your 10mb/s port, to 100mb/s. and do you really need unlimited? Just buy the data as you need it. How much data are you pushing a day / month?

 

The thing is, I have a plugin that allows you to rate posts, which takes a toll on the MYSQL,

So, they did a few things like Query Cache and what not, but sometimes I am getting a Wordpress MYSQL not found, and other errors.

I do not want to disable the rate system, so are other hacks available without hurting SEO?