Where to host your site

After being a happy A2 hosting customer for a number of websites I maintain I've decided to see if the grass was really greener. The site I am working on promises to be the most resource intense site I've ever put together. Even with caching etc. there will be a fair amount of CPU intense operations. No bandwidth concerns but processor and memory requirements seemed higher.

So I started a FatCow account after reading some reviews on the net. I put my mock up site on a private domain on my server and started working on the site this way rather than using my trusty old (and I mean old) intranet server. It was slow, dynamic tasks crawled and the bandwidth wasn't great. Googling 'Drupal Fatcow slow' gave me a little bit more insight into what was going on here. FatCow simply didn't lend itself for Drupal. I'm not making any judgements on its ability to do anything else, but for Drupal I would definitely not recommend it. Their no-bull money back guarantee turns out to be full of bull and I received a partial refund. 

At this point I contacted my customer and asked him what type of budget was in the realm of the possible for the hosting part of it. Looking at their cost benefit matrix loosing even 1 customer per month to CPU or memory allotment issues wasn't an option. I spend the next couple of hours researching hosting. We didn't need a dedicated co-located box but a VPS seemed like the perfect solution. Now VPS servers can range from from as little as $10 per month for 128megs of ram to $800ish for around 15gb of ram. Thankfully due to a misspent youth and career using Linux for everything from file servers, pbx's, terminals to webhosts I felt like I really didn't need the hand holding a lot of the hosting companies give you. I'd rather have fewer safety wheels and more memory.

This left me with Slicehost which is owned by the famous RackSpace and Linode both of which allow you to install a Linux  flavor of your choice and leave you to your own devices after that.

Their entry level, which is all I required, offerings compare on 4 basis options: memory, hd space, bandwidth and our course price. 

Both entry packages cost ~$20 but Linode offers more paper bang for the buck 512m ram vs 256, 16gb of space vs 10gb, 200gb of bandwidth vs 100gb. So I ended up going with Linode and I really enjoyed the process, setup was quick, configuration was quick and after that it was just a matter of setting up the right repositories and some quick command line to get everything ready to go. Installing certificate based SSH authentication should enable me to avoid brute force annoyances, even though I may have to add some auto ip ban triggers soon. 

How does it compare to shared hosting? Well, obviously its more expensive but by the price of a lunch per month yet the speed improvements are amazing. Fast, responsive, complete control and most importantly if my customer where to outgrow this the upgrade path is very quick. Worst case scenario, we get another node and move the DB server to it. That should allow us to be one step ahead of our user base at all times.

I like it