Is it time to move to dedicated hosting?

[joshkraemer]

Our company's website has been hosted with Hostmonster since 2006. Since then, we have seen our average monthly unique visitors grow from around 500 to 5000 currently.

August was our largest month, with 10000 unique visitors generating 22 GB of bandwidth on our hosting account. We have an information request form (php) that sends out an automatic email via the php mail function when a user requests information. This form was hit (submitted) over 1000 times (not spam submissions) in one weekend in August. During that time, we noticed the mail function seemed to delay sending out emails, due to the heavy load most likely.

We are projecting an increase in monthly uniques to 30000 by 2010.

Is it time to move to dedicated hosting, or can Hostmonster handle the growth?

We have been very pleased with Hostmonster thus far. They have responded well to all of our needs, including moving servers, adjusting custom configuration, etc. Downtime has been minimal, with 1 hour per month of combined downtime (at the most).

[linFox]

I'm currently bumping up on 200000 uniques a month (300000+ pageloads) and just about 1TB of bandwidth a month and I'm running very smoothly.

I'd say you'll have no problem.

[joshkraemer]

Thanks for the reply. Our site is entirely MySQL/PHP driven, and even though we've never had any CPU exceeded errors, I'm wondering if an increase in traffic will increase the risk of those CPU errors.

However, on the bright side, it looks like BH/HM is boosting their server performance in a couple of different ways - see this post by Matt Heaton (http://mattheaton.com/?p=174).

[linFox]

Increases in traffic do mean increases in resources, but based on your numbers (and as long as your scripts are well written) it's still nice and low compared to what the servers can take - eg. my site is PHP/MySQL driven too and like I said I'm fine.

And it's always nice to see changes like that.

[D0gSoldi3r]

Well congratulations, sort of good news bad news situation you have there. I do hope my website starts seeing large numbers but i guess i have to remember this is shared hosting meaning we are all sharing each others T1 lines and don't have personal ones and monthly broadband fee's of $1000. I'm thinking of the same thing at the moment so much i've decided to take action and i'm currently setting up my own webserver from home (it's currently online and working) however it's only a local shared broadband connection @ 100 mbps which isn't that fast with an upload of 400 kbp/s probably not fast enough to run a video server but i'm thinking about buying my own T1 line when i can afford it.

so yeah i hope you all the best and hope you're community grows to the point that even dedicated hosting isn't enough ;)

[sjlplat]

Well congratulations, sort of good news bad news situation you have there. I do hope my website starts seeing large numbers but i guess i have to remember this is shared hosting meaning we are all sharing each others T1 lines and don't have personal ones and monthly broadband fee's of $1000. I'm thinking of the same thing at the moment so much i've decided to take action and i'm currently setting up my own webserver from home (it's currently online and working) however it's only a local shared broadband connection @ 100 mbps which isn't that fast with an upload of 400 kbp/s probably not fast enough to run a video server but i'm thinking about buying my own T1 line when i can afford it.

so yeah i hope you all the best and hope you're community grows to the point that even dedicated hosting isn't enough ;)

Hostmonster runs an OC48 backbone. That's equivalent to 1344 T1's. ;)

[rix]

Seeing this thread kinda reassured me again. I am currently hosted with Hostmonster. The company which i am working with is thinking of having a blog/forum thingy to promote our products which is actually philatelic products like stamps and presentation packs. I WAS thinking of suggesting Hostmonster but didn't know whether it could handle the traffic.

We are thinking of doing a Wordpress blog (simple scripts rules!) and then do an addon with Simple Forums. Nothing fanciful. One of the main reason why i am thinking of recommending Hostmonster to my company is cos i got no probs with Hostmonster but like i said, Hostmonster is good for me, but that's just me. I'm not really sure whether it'll work for the company though.. but seeing your replies and discussions, i am set at ease. I do have a small problem though. That is that the LIVECHAT helpdesk is some what slow? Anyone else have this problem?

[joshkraemer]

Thanks for the replies. I noticed that the host we're on, host202, was updated to the latest version of MySQL. According to HM, they also did some hard drive upgrades, and kernel patches.

However, I still see some MySQL slow query log files (our website runs PHPBB 3.0.3 (http://www.phpbb.com/) and Frog CMS (http://www.madebyfrog.com/)). Along with this, the php mail function seems to slow down under large loads of 100+ emails in a few hours. I'm still wondering how this could impact the future website traffic.

[alreadyhosting]

You probably would be alright without dedicated hosting for a while; but if you are drawing that kind of traffic and turning some of the traffic into $$ than I might reccomend going ahead and upgrading.. I guess its your choice.