How many servers has your pet site out grew?

[Keith]

I'd suggest (much like we're doing) taking a look at RackSpace. They've got some really innovative stuff going on over there, and we're probably going to make the switch (which means lots of investment for us).

[Onyx]

From my experience with LiquidWeb, I'm going to be reluctant to move anywhere until I know that someone else has used them and had a good experience xD At a glance RackSpace seems more expensive than our current hosting, though I may be misreading that. Right now I'm paying around $750 a month for two dedicated servers + hourly offsite backups on Khimeros. The offsite backups are rather stupidly expensive, and we haven't added them to Aluriya yet so we're relying on daily backups. Admittedly though I'm not really all that familiar with cloud servers and the advantages they have.

[cpvr]

Right away we contacted them and told them NOT to run the update on Khimeros, because we didn't want Khimeros crashing too. And yet, an hour later... Khimeros crashes. They went ahead and did the update despite being asked not to. Luckily, we were finally able to prevail upon them to revert the update, and Nas was able to retrieve Alu's database. Khimeros has hourly backups, so it was easy to just restart from backups, but still. If they had listened to us in the first place, it would never have happened.

Well, isn't Liquidweb a managed server company? Means, they'll update things without your permission? It just doesn't seem right though, but it happens.

@Keith: When do you think you guys might move on over to Rackspace? How many servers?

[Onyx]

Updating things without our permission in order to keep things running smoothly would be fine. Updating things with the result that our sites crash is not, I'd think, standard practice even for managed server companies. Especially when the client has just contacted them to specifically ask them NOT to update something because it would crash our site and corrupt our database

[soulmirror]

Does anyone have rough idea of what an optimized PHP petsite takes for resources per user? What registered-user and online-user numbers generally correlate to needing to move to a larger server? I know that subetta is huge, so not many sites need to own whole servers. How do you stress test your sites and know what kind of service you'll need?

[cpvr]

Updating things without our permission in order to keep things running smoothly would be fine. Updating things with the result that our sites crash is not, I'd think, standard practice even for managed server companies. Especially when the client has just contacted them to specifically ask them NOT to update something because it would crash our site and corrupt our database

Liquidweb is managed servers though, so they can upgrade and update the server as they seek fit. I was with them for a couple years and never really had any problems. If you told their support team "Please don't upgrade without contacting us", I don't think that error would have been made. But, that's just my opinion and experiences with them.

Does anyone have rough idea of what an optimized PHP petsite takes for resources per user? What registered-user and online-user numbers generally correlate to needing to move to a larger server? I know that subetta is huge, so not many sites need to own whole servers. How do you stress test your sites and know what kind of service you'll need?

Most large pet sites tend to be ran on dedicated servers. It all depends on how well your scripts are coded and such. Some can handle 100 online on a VPS, where others need a dedicated server for that many users online.

[Onyx]

@cpvr Sure they can update as they see fit even if a client asks them not to, as they did with me. But, then the client can also feel free to leave and find another host, as I did. I've switched Khimeros over to ServInt; fabulous, quick, service, a far better server package for less money - I'm happy. At least so far. I'd definitely recommend ServInt. At one time the site went down and they had it back up again within 4 minutes of our submitting a ticket.

[Lewis]

When is a good time to move from shared hosting to a server?

[cpvr]

When is a good time to move from shared hosting to a server?

When your site constantly lags on a shared environment, then its a good idea to go from that to a VPS/dedicated.