I have been a dreamhost fan boy for awhile but i think i want to take it my next client to somewhere else.

they are going to need 99% uptime and i will be doing php/sql stuff for them. Any suggestions?

1/5/2009 8:02:35 AM

I have a dedicated server from SoftLayer ( http://www.softlayer.com ) and a GridServer from MediaTemple ( http://mediatemple.net ) and have no complaints with either.

I also had a dedicated server from ThePlanet ( http://www.theplanet.com ) for years and never had any problem with them either.

1/5/2009 8:46:48 AM

go VPS, no need for a completely dedicated server

i have linode and i've literally had no problems whatsoever with them, and their support staff is fucking awesome:



lol, but seriously, they are

i've also heard excellent things about slicehost

1/5/2009 9:28:12 AM

that's pretty awesome

1/5/2009 9:38:09 AM

Is it possible to squeeze any more gay into a correspondence with Tech Support...short of...I'll suck yo dick?

1/5/2009 9:41:24 AM

is it your mission in life to post stalk me and make a comment about some aspect of my life at every opportunity?

if so, you're doing a damn fine job of it.

1/5/2009 9:52:56 AM

OMGEVANISGAY??

RLY?

1/5/2009 9:55:39 AM

linode ftw

Quote :

"i have linode and i've literally had no problems whatsoever with them, and their support staff is fucking awesome"

1/5/2009 10:18:20 AM

Quote :

"and a GridServer from MediaTemple ( http://mediatemple.net ) and have no complaints"

I've been on the grid for a little over a year now as well; never any downtime and tech support is great when I need it.

1/5/2009 11:08:25 AM

is the gridserver thing an actual VPS? like do you get root shell access?

1/5/2009 11:21:16 AM

the grid thing is more like a shared web hosting account with multiple front-end web servers. you don't get root access like with a VPS. you do get shell but its pretty limited as to what you can do with it.

1/5/2009 12:05:43 PM

i would like to move to "georga" as well.

1/5/2009 2:59:46 PM

i has to be better than georgia

1/5/2009 3:09:09 PM

I'm hosting all my sites (total of 3) on a dedicated box.


If you want to give me box a try let me know.

1/5/2009 8:14:59 PM

i'm hosting all of my sites on a hosting company. if you want to give it a try, let me know.

1/5/2009 9:39:07 PM

I know some guys who are on http://www.mediatemple.net too, I didn't know other people had heard of them. I was learning Django b/c I wanted to try out their interface.

1/5/2009 11:16:36 PM

anybody running any dedicated windows servers?

4/26/2010 9:22:05 AM

^lol, silly asp.net You know we rollin' PHP in this hoe. I scoff at your memory leaks.


I'm also with ThePlanet. They're pretty awesome. If you need less horsepower I'd go with hostgator VPS. We stepped through the ladder with them and all their gear is hosted at ThePlanet as well. Plus great tech support, blah blah blah.

If you just want some cheap, fast, reliable space (we've been 100% apache uptime, 99% email uptime since I started - coming up on a year) you can buy some of our space. And you'd be supporting a 501c3 in Hope Mills. The setup we have can handle 46 concurrent HD video streams (2Mbit/sec) before starting to show service degredation. We currently only have around 15 people on the server - besides the testing I have yet to see it go above 5% utilization. Our profits fund mission-type work for under-18's in the area, btw. PM for more info.

4/26/2010 10:46:32 AM

Quote :

"I know some guys who are on http://www.mediatemple.net too, I didn't know other people had heard of them"

Mediatemple is HUGE. I know a lot of people that use it and you see their MT logo on a vast majority of blogs. (at least ones I frequent)

I, also, use mediatemple

4/26/2010 10:49:32 AM

Quote :

"Results 1 - 10 of about 1,360,000 for php memory leaks. Results 1 - 10 of about 192,000 for asp.net memory leaks."

4/26/2010 10:53:08 AM

if you're doing asp, run that bitch on azure.

4/26/2010 10:55:38 AM

Quote :

"I, also, use mediatemple"

4/26/2010 10:58:51 AM

azure's not ready for prime time

plus, i've read many accounts of people end up being billed hundreds of dollars for doing little hello world type projects

4/26/2010 10:59:06 AM

I have ditched my MediaTemple GridService in favor of a HostGator VPS.

The service itself was fine, but I constantly had overages and wasn't properly notified they were occurring. They'd tell me I had like an estimated $0.50 overage, which constantly turned into $10+ overages.

If I were running a small blog that'd be fine, but I don't and would rather just know what flat fee I've got to pay.

4/26/2010 11:14:57 AM

^geez, whats your blog that you need a VPS to run it? I'm impressed.

4/26/2010 1:22:50 PM

$40/mo server cost for a small blog?

4/26/2010 1:30:18 PM

^^I don't believe its a blog

4/26/2010 1:56:58 PM

It's not a blog. The site running on the VPS (formerly the GridService) is a message board.

Dedicated server hosts the game itself

4/26/2010 2:11:42 PM

geez, whats your blog message board that you need a VPS to run it?

[Edited on April 26, 2010 at 2:15 PM. Reason : .]

4/26/2010 2:15:29 PM

I run a vBulletin message board for a Pokemon web game I made. The forums alone push about 3 million pageviews in normal months, though it spikes from the end of May through August (for fairly obvious reasons).

By contrast, the game itself pushes about 10x as much traffic and is why it has the dedicated server In it's heyday, I was pushing about 60 million pageviews a month, but due to lack of updates (i.e. having a real job) it's dropped quite a bit.

[Edited on April 26, 2010 at 2:44 PM. Reason : it's vBulletin, which I'm sure is part of the need for an actual VPS ]

4/26/2010 2:39:48 PM

were you on a vps during the 60M days?

4/26/2010 2:49:58 PM

Nah, I've had a dedicated server for something like 7 years now. Back then there really weren't any VPS solutions. The last time I changed servers was Dec '08 which boosted my traffic to the 60M figure.

I went from a P4 2.8 with 2GB(?) of memory on ThePlanet to a Xeon 3220 with 4GB of RAM at SoftLayer. Since I constantly get close to going over my bandwidth limits though, I'm going to need to find a new host that offers legit unlimited bandwidth in the next month or so. Right now I have every image and all CSS/JS on the site cache for 3 months before expiring. Ideally, I'd find a place to offload all that traffic so that my server could just handle the actual scripts and MySQL install. If anyone has any recommendations for that, I'd appreciate it -- it's probably going to be a couple of TBs a month minimum.

4/26/2010 3:00:21 PM

oh, the game was getting 60M pageviews. i assumed it was a desktop client rpg not web-based

are images the bulk of the bandwidth? are you gzipping your responses? maybe your image file sizes can be reduced in addition to the caching you're doing

4/26/2010 3:19:19 PM

Nah, it's all web based. Everything is gzipped and luckily most of the images are sprites, which means they're all pretty tiny GIFs. Images aren't exactly the bulk of the bandwidth, but they're probably more than 35-45% (since a hard refresh invalidates all the caching) of it. I know I was hoping over my 3TB of monthly bandwidth before I implemented all the caching.

[Edited on April 26, 2010 at 3:33 PM. Reason : New version cuts back some HTML and switches to some AJAX which will lessen the bandwidth]

4/26/2010 3:32:52 PM

^that's straight baller man. For what it's worth you just got a lot of respect for having something you built yourself that racked in 60M views/month. Impressive.

4/26/2010 4:41:55 PM

bump

8/25/2010 10:14:34 AM

i've had great experiences with http://www.inmotionhosting.com currently using a VPS package with no complaints. great tech support as well.

[Edited on August 25, 2010 at 10:32 AM. Reason : ]

8/25/2010 10:31:14 AM

I still stand by my linode recommendation

8/25/2010 11:17:56 AM

My HostGator VPS is still going strong (especially once I realized that my Apache configuration was limiting to me to only 10 connections at a time -- wtf) and all my support requests have been answered promptly.

That said, my bandwidth issue is still rearing it's ugly head.

The following Hardware Server has surpassed 100% of the monthly bandwidth allocation:
 Hardware Server: (10192) 
 Allowed Usage: 2000 GB
 Current Usage: 2,406.42 GB (120.32%)

8/25/2010 2:16:39 PM

Why don't you price an Akamai NetStorage solution for your images?

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/netstorage.html

8/25/2010 2:35:53 PM

I have and every time I look at it it looks like it's going to be $texas.

At the same time, I get the feeling that there has to be something I'm missing/misunderstanding, since I can't fathom companies spending that much on their services.

Or well, I've actually looked at Amazon S3 not Akamai, mainly because they have an estimator on their site.

[Edited on August 25, 2010 at 2:40 PM. Reason : .]

8/25/2010 2:40:05 PM

I think it's a matter of scale. Once you have an audience so widespread that their geographical proximity to your online content becomes a factor, you probably have money to burn.

8/25/2010 2:41:01 PM

True. I also benefit from many pageviews, but limited unique traffic, which is why my caching has been so effective in the past.

8/25/2010 2:47:14 PM

if most of the images are just sprites and not content that necessarily provides any strategic advantage by hosting yourself, you might want to offload it to a free photo hosting service

http://api.imgur.com/

8/25/2010 2:50:18 PM

Have you considered using [choose your trolling option]?

Trolling options:

1. Silverlight
2. HTML 5

8/25/2010 2:52:56 PM

Quote :

"if most of the images are just sprites and not content that necessarily provides any strategic advantage by hosting yourself, you might want to offload it to a free photo hosting service"

The problem is that even their Pro accounts only allow 2000 images to be served per hour.

1 million pageviews a day * ~6 images per page (minimum) / 24 hrs = ~250,000 requests an hour

Honestly the cheapest option for me is probably just to bring up another webserver/VPS that has a nice chunk of bandwidth attached to it.

Also, FroshKiller please add "CSS Sprite Map" to your list of troll solutions. It's not really a troll solution, but it isn't very viable either.

8/25/2010 3:22:01 PM

I was considering that.

You know, moving your images to a separate server on a separate domain would probably give your site a bump in terms of how quickly the pages load. Max out those parallel connections.

8/25/2010 3:55:46 PM

I could also run lighttpd instead of Apache, since there's really no need for me to be serving images with any amount of overhead.

8/25/2010 3:59:33 PM

Why not serve images from a separate VPS? For instance map your new vps to images.i<3pokemon.com

I recently moved all our archive files to a separate server to solve a space overage problem. Wasn't too bad (on our system I changed 2-3 lines of PHP and they magically were fixed on the next cache update)

8/25/2010 6:44:30 PM

cheapest bulk transfer I know of for images is probably fdcservers.net

http://www.fdcservers.net/cdn.php

8/25/2010 6:51:35 PM