A lot of people on DP are sucessful website owners and I was wondering what types of hosting you all use. Are you dedicated? VPS? Shared? Also, I often wondered how you can judge the capacity of a server. How does CPU and RAM relate to how many pages you can serve? I'm thinking of trying out an idea I have and I am figuring out which way I should go. I love the freedom of dedicated servers, but they are expensive if you site doesn't make the money. If anyone fancies posting links to their sites and telling me what type of hosting they are using for it, that would be a great help in judging where I should start. Cheers
I run a dedicated managed server. It runs on dual opterons with 2gb of ram and dual 120gb SATA drives for optimal performance. I could probably handle a couple million hits on any given day. We barely even touch the surface of optimal performance and we push over a million unique hits monthly. We quickly outgrew shared hosting and there was a need for dedicated, so we quickly moved away from shared to dedicated (unmanaged) and then quickly moved from that to dedicated managed where there was better support.
I have two dedicated servers. Once AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1GB RAM, and a P4 3.0 HT with 1GB RAM The Athlon is for my forums, it performs really good with around 100,000 requests per day. Lots of room to grow. My P4 is for my proxy site blockmenot.com, and gets around 1,000,000+ requests per day. The CPU is getting a bit swamped during peak times, but it can still grow 2-3x more before people will start noticing that the system is slow. I will probably buy another P4 server for my proxy soon, since it's more economical to do it that way, and get a DNS round robin. CPU is needed for intensive PHP/CGI sites. Memory is good if you have many requests per second, and good for databases.
I think it relates more to the type of sites you run, whether they are static mainly html or mainly dynamic/php/asp/cgi and uses DB's would have a huge effect on the servers resources. Also the type of datbases used and whether they on separate servers makes a difference and hosts differ greatly so I dont think there would be a thumb per say.
I really agree, that the program or the application that will run on the server must be a point to be considered and the bandwidth consideration will follow
Iowa Dawg .. (you can PM him) is offering a quality hosting service http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=79105 <<<< Here is His Thread I am looking to share a Big Xeron server I have with a serious internet person