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.
Related
I've made a website for an arts organisation. The website allows people to browse a database of artists' work. The database is large and the image files for the artists' work come to about 150Gb. I have my own server that is currently just being used to keep the images on its hard-drive.
I'm going to purchase hosting so I don't have to worry about bandwidth etc... but would it be better to purchase hosting that allows me to upload my entire image database or should I use the website to get the images from my server? If so how would I do that?
Sorry I am very new to this
I think it could be better to have the data on the same server so you avoid calls to another server for images which are quite big as you say and this can slow you down overall.
I assume you will need to set up some API on your server to deliver the images or at least URLs for them but then you must make sure they are accessible.
You'll want the image files on the same server as your website, as requests elsewhere to pull in images will definitely hinder your site's performance - especially if you have large files.
Looking at large size of database and consideration of bandwidth, dedicated server will be suitable as they includes large disk spaces and bandwidth. You can install webserver as well as database server on same server inspite of managing them separately. Managing database backups and service monitoring becomes much more easier.
For an instance, you can review dedicated server configuration and resources here :- https://www.accuwebhosting.com/dedicated-servers
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/
I was studying about browser performance when loading static files and this doubt has come.
Some people say that use CDN static files (i.e. Google Code, jQuery
latest, AJAX CDN,...) is better for performance, because it requests
from another domain than the whole web page.
Other manner to improve the performance is to set the Expires header
equal to some months later, forcing the browser to cache the static
files and cutting down the requests.
I'm wondering which manner is the best, thinking about performance and
if I may combine both.
Ultimately it is better to employ both techniques if you are doing web performance optimization (WPO) of a site, also known as front-end optimization (FEO). They can work amazingly hand in hand. Although if I had to pick one over the other I'd definitely pick caching any day. In fact I'd say it's imperative that you setup proper resource caching for all web projects even if you are going to use a CDN.
Caching
Setting Expires headers and caching of resources is a must and should be done 100% of the time for your resources. There really is no excuse for not doing caching. On Apache this is super easy to config after enabling mod_expires.c and mod_headers.c. The HTML5 Boilerplate project has good implementation example in the .htaccess file and if your server is something else like nginx, lighttpd or IIS check out these other server configs.
Here's a good read if anyone is interested in learning about caching: Mark Nottingham's Caching Tutorial
Content Delivery Network
You mentioned Google Code, jQuery latest, AJAX CDN and I want to just touch on CDN in general including those you pay for and host your own resources on but the same applies if you are simply using the jquery hosted files cdn or loading something from http://cdnjs.com/ for example.
I would say a CDN is less important than setting server side header caching but a CDN can provide significant performance gains but your content delivery network performance will vary depending on the provider.
This is especially true if your traffic is a worldwide audience and the CDN provider has many worldwide edge/peer locations. It will also reduce your webhosting bandwidth significantly and cpu usage (a bit) since you're offloading some of the work to the CDN to deliver resources.
A CDN can, in some rarer cases, cause a negative impact on performance if the latency of the CDN ends up being slower then your server. Also if you over optimize and employ too much parallelization of resources (using multi subdomains like cdn1, cdn2, cdn3, etc) it is possible to end up slowing down the user experience and cause overhead with extra DNS lookups. A good balance is needed here.
One other negative impact that can happen is if the CDN is down. It has happened, and will happen again. This is more true with free CDN. If the CDN goes down for whatever reason, so does your site. It is yet another potential single point of failure (SPOF). For javascript resources you can get clever and load the resource from the CDN and should it fail, for whatever the case, then detect and load a local copy. Here's an example of loading jQuery from ajax.googleapis.com with a fallback (taken from the HTML5 Boilerplate):
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/vendor/jquery-1.8.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script>
Besides obvious free API resources out there (jquery, google api, etc) if you're using a CDN you may have to pay a fee for usage so it is going to add to hosting costs. Of course for some CDN you have to even pay extra to get access to certain locations, for example Asian nodes might be additional cost then North America.
For public applications, go for CDN.
Caching helps for repeated requests, but not for the first request.
To ensure fast load on first page visit use a CDN, chances are pretty good that the file is already cached by another site already.
As other have mentioned already CDN results are of course heavily cached too.
However if you have an intranet website you might want to host the files yourself as they typically load faster from an internal source than from a CDN.
You then also have the option to combine several files into one to reduce the number of requests.
A CDN has the benefit of providing multiple servers and automatically routing your traffic to the closest location to your client. This can result in faster delivery, optimized by location.
Also, static content doesn't require special application servers (like dynamic content) so for you to be able to offload it to a CDN means you completely reduce that traffic. A streaming video clip may be too big to cache or should not be cached. But you don't neccessarily want to support that bandwidth. A CDN will take on that traffic for you.
It is not always about the cache. A small application web server may just want to provide the dynamic content but needs a solution for the heavy hitting media that rarely changes. CDNs handle the scaling issue for you.
Agree with #Anthony_Hatzopoulos (+1)
CDN complements Caching; also in some cases, it will help optimize Caching directives.
For example, a company I work for has integrated behavior-learning algorithms into its CDN, to identify and dynamically cache generated objects.
Ordinarily, these objects would be un-Cachable (i.e. [Cache-Control: max-age=0] Http header). But in this case, the system is able to identify Caching possibilities and override original HTTP Header directions. (For example: a dynamically generated popular product that should be Cached, or popular Search result page that, while being generated dynamically, is still presented time over time in the same form to thousands of users).
And yes, before you ask, the system can also identify personalized data and very freshness, to prevent false positives... :)
Implementing such an algorithm was only possible due to a reverse-proxy CDN technology. This is an example of how CDN and Caching can complement each other, to create better and smarter acceleration solutions.
Above those experts quotes, the explanation are perfect to understand CDN tech and also cache
I would just provide my personal experience, I had worked on the joomla virtuemart site and unfortunately it will not allow update new joomla and virtuemart version cause it was too much customised fields in product pages, so once the visitor up to 900/DAY and lots user could not put their items in their basket because each time to called lots js and ajax called for order items takes too much time
After optimise the site, we decide to use CDN, then the performance is really getting good, along by record from gtmetrix, the first YSlow Score was 50% then after optimise + CDN it goes to 74%
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.florihana.com/jWlY35im
and from dashboard of CDN you could see which datacenter cost most and data charged most to get your improvement of marketing:
But yes to configure CDN it has to be careful of purge time and be balancing numbers of resource CDN cause if it down some problem you need to figure out which resource CDN cause
Hope this does help
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.
Before we sign up for any hosting company to host our app or pages, i think it probably is good to find out the speed so that if it is too slow, we may as well pay a little more to find a better place to put our app. the question is, is there a way to find out some sites that a hosting company is hosting and what is the best way to test the speed of the site? (is using "ab" command one of the best methods?)
Check out this blog http://www.joelonsoftware.com/backIssues-2009-02.html from Joel on Software about http://www.akamai.com/
It details your packet are routed to a Akamai node and then from there go to the fast lane to the nearest Akamai exit before the end point.
I don't think that you can generally find out the speed of a site as that is a function of the route to your site and how that route is set up. If a provider has a route to Toledo before routing to the next town the speed may appear slow even if they are running the fastest type of link.
Netcraft monitors hosting providers and can provide this type of information, but I'm not sure it's all that important. If your testing individual sites there may be other bottle necks that may not necessarily affect you.