9 replies to this topic

[IBBoard]

I think the most important thing is how balanced those page views are and how efficient (or overloaded with MODs) your site scripts are. 200K page views averages out at ~280 per hour, or <5 per minute, which doesn't feel like a huge amount of traffic. If you get that in major, intense peaks and then long lulls such that you get 10s of hits per second on a regular pattern then you might have more problems with a Shared Hosting package and might need a VPS.

Upgrading at ASO is really easy (send a ticket to Billing, they upgrade your quotas and invoice you for the difference in cost - no server moves and no outages necessary) so I'd suggest getting as small a package as possible (which would actually be a Tiny account! But I suspect you might actually use more disk space than that).

There are coupon codes for discounts and sign-up links in my signature.

[IBBoard]

Reseller Hosting is (as far as I understand it) more like Shared Hosting with WHM than it is like Cloud. Looking at the "Configuration" page for the Cloud VPS then WHM is available on Cloud accounts. You do get support as well - 768MB and up is "fully managed" by ASO, so it should (in effect) be a more powerful and flexible version of Shared Hosting.

If you think you're getting too many hits and too much traffic to dynamic sites than a Shared account could handle (which things like Drupal could be at your kind of numbers - it could end up adversely affecting performance for the other customers) then a 768MB server would seem like a good point to start. I've got an old VPS account (pre-Cloud) with that much memory and I'm running Apache as well as several Python scripts, version control servers and a number of other things with some room to spare (and even more, if one of the Python apps wasn't so memory hungry!)

[IBBoard]

Moving servers shouldn't lose you traffic, if you handle it correctly. Moving to a better server may even increase your traffic, as your site will be more responsive and so word of mouth could increase.

If you're worried about an outage on your site during the transition then perform the migration as follows:

0) Set up scripts for the sites on the new server
1) Post an announcement
2) Close down any user-contribution sections (disable posting, comments, etc)
3) Take database backups of the old sites
4) Restore database backups to the new server (and re-enable everything)
5) Change DNS to point to the new server
6) Wait for each ISP to update their DNS cache so that all visitors see the new server (normally 4hrs but can be 72hrs, but varies by ISP and you basically have no control over it)

You'll obviously need a gap between 1 and 2 so that people know what to expect, but the quicker you can do 2 through 5 the better. ASO also offer a transfer service for people using cPanel on their other host, so you could ask the Techs what their process is to minimise outages for dynamic sites with user-submitted content (but it might be your responsibility and they just handle the heavy lifting of transferring lots of data - I've never used the service myself).

If you have control over individual DNS records and their TTL (Time To Live) then you can theoretically shorten step 6 by adding a step 1b where you drop the TTL to about 1hr so that caches shouldn't be long-lived and a step 5b where you increase the TTL back to what it was, but some ISPs could ignore that (or set a lower limit) and your DNS provider might rely on caching and so not appreciate it if you leave the TTL too low for too long.

I hope that makes sense.

[NyteOwl]

don't forget

7) re-enable user-contribution sections on new site location

[billzo]

ZG, on 24 July 2012 - 12:43 PM, said:

I have about 20 sites on Wordpress, Concrete5, etc that generate about 2gb transfer per month, the load being 2 sites. I have 5 other sites on a different host that generate a lot more, about 200,000 pageviews per month, all PHP/MySQL dynamic pages, at about 20,000 unique visitors/mo.

ZG, on 27 July 2012 - 01:30 PM, said:

I am moving all sites over to Drupal. I was thinking of starting with Cloud VPS, 768MB RAM.

This seems sufficient for my activity as well as some room to grow. $40/mo and expandable makes me think this is a good option. Am I thinking along the right lines?

ZG, on 29 July 2012 - 09:06 AM, said:

Thanks! I am worried about shared hosting due to the amount of traffic the sites get. Then again, once I've made this move I may lose all that traffic anyway. Hope not, but at least I can downgrade if it does.

I appreciate all feedback. If any ASO chums want to add your insight, feel free.

I imagine your URL structure is going to change if you move from Wordpress to Drupal.  If your URL changes, you are likely to lose traffic.  Moving to a new server shouldn't impact your traffic at all.  Changing your CMS and URL structure certainly will.  

If that traffic is important to you, you are best to keep using the CMSes you are currently using and keep your existing URL structure.  Moving to a new host/server is fine.  Avoid changing the URL structure if possible.  

To give you an example, in April 2011 we changed one of our sites to use "search engine friendly URLs".  Our old URL structure was site.com/file.php?id=1368 and we created a script named file.php to do a 301 permanent redirect from the old ID numbers to the new "search engine friendly URL" to avoid problems.  Google killed our traffic and it still hasn't recovered.

Just a word of caution.

[IBBoard]

NyteOwl: I already had that covered under #4 - "and re-enable everything"

As for Billzo's point on URLs changing, if you can then try to keep the URLs the same to avoid problems. If you've already got "SEO-friendly" URLs enabled (or are otherwise using some kind of system of "keyword per page" rather than an internal ID number) then you might find that you can migrate without changing any URLs. It'll all depend on the patterns that the two systems allow/use.

Also, if you're planning to change the scripts then I'd suggest doing that either before or after the move, not as part of it, as it'll reduce down-time. Either change to your new scripts on the old servers, then migrate to ASO, or migrate to ASO, make sure it all works, and then change to your new scripts. No point in making the transition more complex or time consuming than it needs to be