Joey Link
01-13-2009, 04:26 AM
Well guys, to make this short, my site has huge problems. We're fortunate enough to be growing extremely fast (31 new members just today) but there are so many users online all the time that we're getting the dreaded "Too many connections /<edited>/<edited>/html/forum/includes/class_core.php on line 311" error. It's not happening just once or twice, I'm talking the site was down for half the day today due to this.
I've known I was going to have to switch for a while, but I've been extremely scared of screwing something up in the process. Before I continue, here are the forum stats:
Age: 5 months, 7 days
Threads: 2,594
Posts: 22,797
Members: 942
This thing is snowballing faster than I ever thought it would, and I need to get the hosting under control. Right now I'm on a shared hosting plan with aplus.net for $35-$50 per month. They offer 250GB of disk space, 2500GB monthly transfer, and unlimited emails. They've been great to me, but I can't keep bouncing off the CPU limit on a daily basis. Here is what I'm looking for in a host:
- A stable, professional company. I don't want to be dealing with a bunch of 16 year olds running this out of their parents basement.
- Adequate disk space with redundancy in case of a hard drive failure.
- 24/7 Tech Support (live chat preferred)
- Unlimited email addresses.
- Host Managed. As busy as I am promoting the site, I don't have time to admin the server(s).
- Room to grow. Ideally I'd like to get with a host that can provide me with either a low cost dedicated server or VPS for now, but be able to offer multi-server services for when we get really big (30k-40k users? not sure when sites normally go to this type of setup) fairly easily. Basically, I don't want to have to migrate again.
- I'd prefer it be located in the Northwest, since my site is for residents of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
- Value. We don't have a ton of money right now, and I don't think that for our small 1000 user site we should be paying more than $100/mo. for now, but I could be wrong.
What do you guys suggest?
My other questions involve the migration from one host to another. How do you migrate with minimum downtime? It seems like it would be impossible to have no downtime due to the domain name transfer, am I wrong? What's the average downtime for a migration?
Thanks a ton everyone, this means the world to me.
I've known I was going to have to switch for a while, but I've been extremely scared of screwing something up in the process. Before I continue, here are the forum stats:
Age: 5 months, 7 days
Threads: 2,594
Posts: 22,797
Members: 942
This thing is snowballing faster than I ever thought it would, and I need to get the hosting under control. Right now I'm on a shared hosting plan with aplus.net for $35-$50 per month. They offer 250GB of disk space, 2500GB monthly transfer, and unlimited emails. They've been great to me, but I can't keep bouncing off the CPU limit on a daily basis. Here is what I'm looking for in a host:
- A stable, professional company. I don't want to be dealing with a bunch of 16 year olds running this out of their parents basement.
- Adequate disk space with redundancy in case of a hard drive failure.
- 24/7 Tech Support (live chat preferred)
- Unlimited email addresses.
- Host Managed. As busy as I am promoting the site, I don't have time to admin the server(s).
- Room to grow. Ideally I'd like to get with a host that can provide me with either a low cost dedicated server or VPS for now, but be able to offer multi-server services for when we get really big (30k-40k users? not sure when sites normally go to this type of setup) fairly easily. Basically, I don't want to have to migrate again.
- I'd prefer it be located in the Northwest, since my site is for residents of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
- Value. We don't have a ton of money right now, and I don't think that for our small 1000 user site we should be paying more than $100/mo. for now, but I could be wrong.
What do you guys suggest?
My other questions involve the migration from one host to another. How do you migrate with minimum downtime? It seems like it would be impossible to have no downtime due to the domain name transfer, am I wrong? What's the average downtime for a migration?
Thanks a ton everyone, this means the world to me.