Which webhost do the "big boys" use?

I also like HostGator.com for the smaller sites, under 50K in visitors per month.

I'll second that. I've been with WiredTree for 3 or 4 years now. Best host I've ever used, by far.

Another vote for Wiredtree. They have great support for sure
and was the only host that was willing to work with me when
my sites were Dossed attacked.

-Ray Edwards

I like Hostgator and the support there (including 24-hour chat if something goes wrong).

lol... If you're going to post something like this, at least make sure you have a signature with links to your websites in it :-P

Brad

knownhost.com

That's quite an expensive tag for those specs. 2 HDD's? No RAID 10? There's a performance loss there as well as pretty much no redundancy there with 2 hdd's. RAID 1 is ehh, "ok" but I'd recommend no less than at least 4 disks in RAID 10.


Lol, "a few". The others just spout off cheap shared hosting, which the OP is clearly not looking for.

LimeStone Networks, Eleven2 & WiredTree are among some decent companies. Although, WiredTree's expertise is more on the VPS side. Some people have been having quite some issues with the dedi services.

E2 has been in the game for quite some time as well as LimeStone.


Your current provider could also be using crappy hardware, which will cause problems. I'd say test out a VPS/Hybrid with 4-6GB of RAM, on RAID 10, use LiteSpeed & caching such as CloudFlare and see where that puts you. That of course, is just a ball-park since I don't know what the exact specs are of your current server.

A RAID 10 config w/ 12GB of RAM will out perform the same proc setup w/ more RAM running on RAID 1 (2 drives) any day.

I thought you all were one of "The Big Boys!"

The smug answer would be "How big do you want to go?"

There are plenty of good answers here already for solving the problems of a fairly successful business, but if you want to play in the same leagues as FedEx, Amazon, Visa etc, then you are pretty much looking at building a tailored solution of your own.

Admittedly, stuff like EC2 will get you going a lot quicker than a few years back and if you want to start from a higher configuration than that, you could look at some of the "Platform as a Service" offerings from the likes of Oracle, but you'll still probably need an IT team of your own to design and run it.

Big IT architectures use an n-tier model with web traffic, compute resources and database all split out into their own layers (and often multiple physical boxes in each layer) and spray IP traffic into that mixture at the front end.

If you go that route, look to hire folks that understand "n-tier" models. :-)

Martin

I'll second what Anik said. We recently moved all our programs to liquidweb and have been very happy with them so far. Our "super server" over there handles tens of millions of hits per month without breaking a sweat (under a thousand bucks a month).

Brad, hopefully this is the answer you need. It was given my by someone who's been through tons of providers - shared, semi-dedicated, level 9 hostgator VPS to fully managed dedicated. My contact tells me that finally he finally feels he's found home after years of moving server to server. He has membership sites with tens of thousands of members and much bot traffic additionally (his own scripts). He swears by rackspace hosting. Hope this helps