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 🙂
do you put anything on s3? i've found putting heavy content like images/css/js can help big time. Pretty cheap too.
$750/month? Mate, managed servers are a ripoff. We pay much less than $200/month for our dedicated server that we manage ourselves. Of course you need to have the expertise.
Sounds expensive, but if you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.
I would recommend moving all of your static files – images, style sheets, etc over to a cdn (Amazon s3 would probably be the easiest and cheapest given your size).
Wow. USD$750/month does seem quite expensive. My Drupal site does around 60k-80k page views per day and it runs perfectly fine on a $30/month self-managed VPS 🙂
Then again I don't get links from other popular sites nor do I have 200k page view days. I know having the capacity to handle those “fark'ed moments” can be very expensive, but hopefully it would be a worthwhile investment to build your kingdom.
MT is great – using the $20 option, but it has been very nice. Checkout the referral links to perhaps help offset some of the costs. People always want to know where big sites are hosted and you may get some easy links by just throwing up your referral links back to MT. I got 2 this past year.
Build it and they will come….. I hope.
Had to upgrade TwiTip a couple of weeks back too (although it started on dodgy hosting) and had similar 'its a gamble' thoughts – but I think it pays off. Extra page views from people who got frustrated before, perhaps a few extra subscribers, less headaches and distraction of having to manage a stressed out server etc.
Sounds like Inquisitr is getting some nice link love – hope it converts to a step up in baseline traffic!
have you use any new application for virtual Extreme
I agree with monty that it is simply a rip off to pay $700/month for a managed server
MediaTemple?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Dedicated virtual Extreme is very interesting topic i really like it…..
If you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.
Sounds expensive, but if you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.
Sounds expensive, but if you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.
If you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.
Sounds expensive, but if you had to hire someone to manage it for you, it could be double this. If you are just getting DB timeouts, rather than having problems with bandwidth, perhaps your WP install needs tweaking.