Best way to host a large site.

5 replies
Hi Guys,

I was hoping to get some advice in regards to hosting a large site on a VPS and which you feel is best and why. The site itself is currently being populated by VA's and myself but I'm by now means in the position to throw large amounts of money on dedicated hosting.

The website by years end should have close to 6000 products listed with images but does not sell the products directly off the site so there will be no downloading directly from site. In essence it's being built along the same lines as eBay and Amazon but only dealing in digital downloads where 90% of products will have cloaked affiliate links.

Here in lies my problem, it's currently hosted by GoDaddy whom I have no gripes with but the site is on a shared hosting plan which is not ideal for this site whats so ever in regards to load times for those on slower connections.

I was hoping to get some advice on what would be best, I have a budget of about $100 extra per month to play with.

Cheers.
#host #large #site
  • Profile picture of the author Dane Vaninc
    It doesn't matter how many pages your site is.... if you code it in PHP and MySQL, you could have maybe 10 simple .php files controlling your whole entire site.

    I have a website with 144,000 image and text rich pages, being run from 4 simple .php files.

    I think you need to ask yourself:
    How much traffic will I be getting?

    And if the answer to that is less than 5,000 visitors per day, then I'd say you shouldn't worry too much.

    However if you will be handling more traffic, you should really consider the dedicated server from eBoundhost. Their entry level ($99 a month) gives you 10 terabytes and 5 I.P. addresses on a 4gb ram machine.

    You could also pay attention to the ways in which you design your website, particularly with regards to image compression. 10 Terabytes can go a long way if you are properly compressing your data.
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    • Profile picture of the author evolution2
      My VPS is through Hostgator and is just a few bucks under $100 a month. Their support has always been really, really, good.
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      • Profile picture of the author BigNorm
        I was looking at Host Gator but was hoping to get a bit more feed back other people a well in regards to either this service or another which has greatly increased the site loading time.

        Originally Posted by evolution2 View Post

        My VPS is through Hostgator and is just a few bucks under $100 a month. Their support has always been really, really, good.
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    • Profile picture of the author BigNorm
      I should have specified that the website is current built using Wordpress. I am going to get a custom theme built for it but that would be a few months down the track. At the moment the site doesn't get alot of traffic but it's only a month old as it stands but I'm getting really slow loading times when I test it, 11secs.

      Originally Posted by Dane Vaninc View Post

      It doesn't matter how many pages your site is.... if you code it in PHP and MySQL, you could have maybe 10 simple .php files controlling your whole entire site.

      I have a website with 144,000 image and text rich pages, being run from 4 simple .php files.

      I think you need to ask yourself:
      How much traffic will I be getting?

      And if the answer to that is less than 5,000 visitors per day, then I'd say you shouldn't worry too much.

      However if you will be handling more traffic, you should really consider the dedicated server from eBoundhost. Their entry level ($99 a month) gives you 10 terabytes and 5 I.P. addresses on a 4gb ram machine.

      You could also pay attention to the ways in which you design your website, particularly with regards to image compression. 10 Terabytes can go a long way if you are properly compressing your data.
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  • Profile picture of the author mikemcghee
    Look into running your wordpress site on NGINX backend w/ Varnish Cache front end, APC and using W3 Cache plugin. Of course you will need to be familiar with Linux to do this. Nginx runs wordspress extremely well, in fact wordpress.com uses it. I run this setup on a VPS from stormondemand.com and only pay $50/month. I like them because you only pay for the traffic you use.
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