I had to bite the bullet today and upgrade from MediaTemple’s Dedicated virtual Extreme to a proper dedicated box for The Inquisitr. It may sound strange that we even started on a DV but the MT specs are the equivalent of a basic server anyway, and actually better than a few dedicated boxes I’ve had over the years. I also loved being in the cloud, and one thing I’ll say for it: it never crashed. Sure, we’d have the occasional heavy load, but even under complete stress, the DV server never once failed, and that wouldn’t have ever been the case with a dedicated box.
So now we’re going to the Nitro. $750/ mth US. Expensive when you’re going from $150 US a month, but it’s a gamble.
It’s a gamble in terms of traffic. We’ve had 3 days now of slow server due to traffic, and we got a front page on Fark this morning AND a link from CollegeHumor and the site shit itself in unprecedented fashion. The server never died, but DB errors, site not load etc etc. Not MT’s fault, simply a volume of traffic vs resources issue.
I didn’t want to upgrade yet, and on our usual daily load what we had was fine (which these days is 30-60k page views a day), but the issue then becomes one that if we do 100 or 200k days (yesterday was 197k) we’re actually losing more traffic due to slow provision or no provision at all. It’s an investment in future growth and to best cater for our peaks.
One thing I did want to say about MediaTemple: just brilliant. No migration on this end: I get the same IP, same control panel, same everything except greatly improved resources. Better still: the server will be on for us in 2-6 hours MAX. I know of no company that can provision servers so quickly. Brilliant, and I can’t speak highly enough of them…well, presuming everything goes smoothly with the upgrade 🙂
