I have five websites that I designed and now manage on a month-to-month basis. Currently, each website is hosted individually via HostGator. I am realizing this is the improper (and costly) way to manage multiple websites and am curious into how I could transfer the websites to a single server, and some hosts you guys find reliable.
Below is a snap of one of the sites usages, these are all static sites that are quite small. How much space would I need on my new, single server to accommodate 20 of these websites?
Current site usage:
http://imgur.com/18BvsC2
Your image shows you are using 6.7 megabytes of data for one website. If that is similar space usage for all 20 of your anticipated domains, you need virtually very little hosting space as far as storage goes these days. Most entry level virtual hosting plans come with more than enough to meet your 20 domain expectations of like usage.
You want virtual hosting regardless. Most web hosting providers have plans that allow you to host many domains, including hostgator. Here is a link to compare their plans. http://www.hostgator.com/shared-compare
I've used DreamHost and HostMonster in the past, with nothing bad to say about them.
Perhaps you should brush up more on the pros, cons and hows of web hosting. Here is a link I just googled that might get you started. http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/web-hosting-beginner-guide/
Related
I have a website that could be visited by countries in different continentals. I noticed that most hosting companies have data centers in the US only, which might affect the performance when people from India, for example, are visiting the site. AWS and google own data centers all around the world, so would this be a better choice to solve the above-mentioned doubt? Are they using some technology that makes the website located in all datacenters ?
More about the website :
It is a dynamic website which depends heavily on the database. It mostly involves text. Few ajax code is there.
It is a Q & A website.
You would use some sort of load balancer.
Such as
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
Cloud Load Balancing
Cloud providers such as AWS has something called edge locations. When you deploy a website code, AWS will deploy the same code to edge locations around the world. When a user visits your website and the request reaches to AWS, AWS will redirect the requests to the edge location that is geographically closer to the user. So that the request will be served to the user faster.
I noticed that most hosting companies have data centers in the US only, which might affect the performance when people from India, for example, are visiting the site.
If your web site has purely or mostly static content, it usually won't matter (read about web caching), unless its traffic is large. As a typical example, I manage http://refpersys.org/ (physically hosted by OVH in France) and it is well visible from India: the latency is less than a few hundred milliseconds.
If your web site is extremely dynamic, it could matter (e.g. if every keystroke in a web browser started from India required an AJAX call to the US-located host).
Read much more about HTTP and perhaps TCP/IP. Don't confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet (which existed before the Web).
If performance really matters to you, you would set up some distributed and load balanced web service, by hosting on each continent. You might for instance use some distributed database technologies for the data (read about database replication), e.g. with PostGreSQL as your back-end database.
Of course, you can find web hosting in India.
And all that has some cost, mostly software development and deployment (network sysadmin skills are rare).
It is a Q & A website.
Then it is not that critical (assuming a small to medium traffic), and you can afford (at first) a single hosting located in a single place. I assume no harm is done if a given answer becomes visible worldwide only after several minutes.
Once your website is popular enough, you would have resources (human labor and computing hosting) to redesign it. AFAIK, StackOverflow started with a single web hosting and later improved to its current state. Design your website with some agile software development mindset: the data (that is past questions and answers typed by human users) is the most important asset, so make sure to design your database schema correctly, taking into account database normalization), and ensure that your data is backed-up correctly and often enough. And web technologies are evolving too (in 2021 the Web won't be exactly the same as today in December 2019, see e.g. this question).
If you wanted a world-wide fault-proof Q & A website, you could get a PhD in designing it well enough. Global distributed database consistency is still a research topic (see e.g. this research report).
I've been looking for a free web host where I don't have to use a template. I have my own website fully coded and just want to port it into their server. I don't know if I'm missing something, but every free web host I've come across requires me to choose a template. Please help.
I think this information can be useful for you. If you plan to get your website, here is one good free web hosting provider to choose - 000webhost.com
They provide hosting absolutely free, there is no catch. You get 1500 MB of disk space and 100 GB bandwidth. They also have cPanel control panel which is amazing and easy to use website builder. Moreover, there is no any kind of advertising on your pages.
You can register here: http://www.000webhost.com/864177.html
When it comes to web hosting, what you pay for is always what you get. The more expensive companies are expensive for a reason - they can afford all of the costs to maintain and secure your site. Free hosts are not going to treat your site the same way at all.
Venture at your own risk, but no matter what company you look at, always research customer reviews!
Is cloud hosting the way to go? Or is there something better that delivers fast page loads?
The reason I ask is because I run a buddypress site on a bluehost dedicated server, but it seems to run slow at most times of the day. This scares me because at the moment the sites not live and I'm afraid when it gets traffic it'll become worse and my visitors will lose interest. I use Amazon Cloud to handle all my media, JS, and CSS files along with a catching plugin, but it still loads slow at times.
I feel like the problem is Bluehost, because I visit other sites running buddypress and their sites seem to load instantly. Im not web hosting savvy so can someone please point me in the right direction here?
The hosting choice depends on many factors such as technical requirements, growth rates, burst rates, budgets and more.
Bigger Hardware
To scale up hosting operation, your first choice is often just using a more powerful server, VPS, or cloud instance. The point is not so much cloud vs. dedicated but that you simply bring more compute power to the problem. Cloud can make scaling up easier - often with a few clicks.
Division of Labor
The next step often is division of labor. You offload database, static content, caching or other items to specific servers or services. For example, you could offload static content to a CDN. You could a dedicated database.
Once again, cloud vs non-cloud is not the issue. The point is to bring more resources to your hosting problems.
Pick the Right Application Stack
I cannot stress enough picking the right underlying technology for your needs. For example, I've recently helped a client switch from a Apache/PHP stack to a Varnish/Nginx/PHP-FPM stack for a very business Wordpress operation (>100 million page views/mo). This change boosted capacity by nearly 5X with modest hardware changes.
Same App. Different Story
Also just because you are using a specific application, it does not mean the same hosting setup will work for you. I don't know about the specific app you are using but with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Vbulletin and others, the plugins, site design, themes and other items are critical to overall performance.
To complicate matter, user behavior is something to consider as well. Consider a discussion form that has a 95:1 read:post ratio. What if you do something in the design to encourage more posts and that ratio moves to 75:1. That means more database writes, less caching, etc.
In short, details matter, so get a good understanding of your application before you start to scale out hosting.
A hosting service is part of the solution. Another part is proper server configuration.
For instance this guy has optimized his setup to serve 10 million requests in a day off a micro-instance on AWS.
I think you should look at your server config first, then shop for other hosts. If you can't control server configuration, try AWS, Rackspace or other cloud services.
just an FYI: You can sign up for AWS and use a micro instance free for one year. The link I posted - he just optimized on the same server. You might have to upgrade to a small server because Amazon has stated that micro is only to handle spikes and sustained traffic.
Good luck.
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question, and will be happy to remove the Q if needed.
When a site grows from a just-a-fun project to a site with bigger load of visitor, and you want to enable them to upload videos, you might find yourself in a need of a better hosting, including dedicated server and a no-limit web traffic (or some reasonable limit).
So, if people can upload their videos, and if page has around 1000-10000 visitors per day, what kind of hosting is there to choose from? What is needed in that case?
Thx
You are looking for a scalable solution.
The term cloud hosting comes to mind. Hosting your site in full or in parts (only the large media perhaps) at a cloud provider resolves the problem of the storage limit of servers in the easiest (and cheapest) manner.
I have two specs from two different hosts I am using:
(a) Dedicated server with Full duplex 100Mbits internet connection ($140 per month)
(b) Shared Host on a server that has 100Mbits internet connection ($7 per month)
I have tested my application which downloads from other servers and lets users download from my site in turn. I have tested this again and again and it takes the same time to download files! But the dedicated is much faster in the final download to the clients computer.
Firstly, are there any Linux commands or tools I can use to test bandwidth properly for each server?
Secondly, why the hell do they have the same download speed from other servers??
Please shed some light on this as I feel I've been wasting money for no reason!!
Thanks all
First, you can use iperf to test your network speeds. Second, you're not paying for the speed, you're paying for the power and flexibility of having essentially your own server configured however you want. With a shared host, your site is most likely on a machine with a hundred other sites, each competing for resources.
Also, the bottleneck is probably not on your end or on your host's end, but rather somewhere in between the content you're fetching and your servers.
if i read correctly, your shared server is just as fast as the dedicated when fetching a file, but much slower when serving it.
I'd say that the box your shared server is in has the "out" bandwidth mostly used by the other client's slices, while the "in" bandwidth is mostly unused, so you get almost full performance.
sounds right, since serving files is a lot more common task than fetching them.
The big difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting is that with dedicated hosting, you're the only account using that box. With shared hosting, there could be (and most likely are) thousands of other web sites hosted on it.
If one of those sites goes wonky and takes the whole box with it, your site goes too. On a dedicated box, the only site that's going to go wonky is yours.
With dedicated, you probably also have full admin rights to the box, which you probably don't have with the shared host.
Well, one possiblity is that the shared site is on a host that has very little load from the other shared sites. If all the shared sites are just sitting there getting very little hits, then your site basically is getting full use of the box, so its no different from a dedicated box.
But if those other sites start getting traffic, your site will be impacted.
Not sure if the shared site is full duplex or not, but that doesn't always make a difference (not an expert there).
Perhaps the servers they are downloading from are the bottleneck? You could have a dedicated gigabit pipe but it won't help if you can only get 10mbps from the other servers.
Remember the benefit of a dedicated host is that your performance will not be affected by other processes on the machine. The extra money guarantees you that 100mbit, not that you'll see better performance than a hosted machine at any given time.