Hosting reccomendations

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Bill1954

Free Member
May 24, 2010
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  • #1
    Hello guys,
    we have been hosting our ecommerce shop on USA servers for the last 3 years. Recently we have noticed that server speeds have dropped and outages are becoming frequent, in fact our site was offline for 3 full days last week.
    We are now looking at hosting in the UK. The servers must be able to host asp with an access database, uptime must be at least 99% and we need webspace of about 10gb (currently we only have 1gb and we have already exceeded it.
    Any reccomendations will be gratefully received
     
    TotalWebSolutions

    TotalWebSolutions

    Free Member
    Sep 29, 2009
    3,626
    616
    Stockport
  • #2
    Hi Bill1954,

    Would you be able to convert to MySQL for the database? If so we can certainly provide hosting for you. If you were to also move to our payment gateway then we would give you 6 months free hosting on our Corporate package.

    Click the link in my signature to visit our website and find out more. Feel free to drop me a PM with any questions.

    Thanks,

    Simon
     
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    jake the peg

    Free Member
    Jun 27, 2011
    50
    5
  • #10
    check out stripedogdesigns(dot)co(dot)uk... they gave me a great deal of £25 per year for 50GB server space, 50GB per month bandwidth. The server is fast and I havn't noticed any downtime yet.

    speak to a guy called john, he'll give you much better rates than advertised on the site!
     
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    ServWise

    ServWise

    Free Member
    • Jan 22, 2008
    1,267
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    The Internet
    www.servwise.com
  • #11
    By all means take a look at our UK Windows hosting. Unlike most we dont limit our plans by number of email account, Databases or websites, we only limit by space and bandwidth as this is what costs us. As it should be, a DB doing nothing does not cost us so we dont charge for it.

    All of our plans can be upgraded for space and bandwidth for those that need especially high amounts of either.

    A Business plan (using our coupon) with 10GB of space would cost £27.72GBP a month (Cheaper if paying annually). Not the cheapest, but remember you get what you pay for.
     
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    webstore

  • #12
    We have just moved our Ruby-on-Rails based websites mainly serving the US to a RackSpace CloudServer with RAID 10 HDDs - in Chicago. We are finding it brilliant since we are only paying for what we use in server resources and connectivity.

    RackSpace offer the same package in the UK at very similar prices.

    In a way its similar as to whether you have a water meter at home. You pay for what you use (the Cloud) or pay a normally higher fixed standing charge (Dedicated).
    .
     
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    Dominic Taylor

    Free Member
    Jun 19, 2008
    1,173
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    Bath
  • #13
    Edit: OK so this one is for US audiences my bad! Post edited - but I hope the below is useful, keeping websites as fast as possible is what I like to do :)

    Hopefully I'm not too offtopic but the below is just for info and hopefully to show how location matters (and perhaps server setup - perhaps you've specced a VDS which is too low-powered - this buzz about 'paying for what you need' is all good, but in real life a VDS is just a small server so when implemented wrongly can harm performance - a system needs good RAM, good i/o and decent CPU to run well - a VDS in swap will kill performance):

    But primarily, latency (far away from the visitor) will kill any performance benefit of any system - regardless of its type.

    Using webstore.co.uk *As an example of a US hosted site* (not that it shouldn't be in the US, because it's targeting US visitors presumably!) because I know people have recommended US hosts, I don't know where Pingdom tests from but at 5.2s for a simple pageload it's not too snappy. The quickest I got was 4s, on a smaller page.

    Our own site is ~40% larger with ~35% more HTTP requests and loads in under 3 seconds.

    Note - all these tests are far slower than real-world results due to how the test works, but are useful as a relative comparison I hope.

    Another way to speed up a site (once it's hosted in the UK ;)) is to setup HTTP caching eg varnish, to reduce the dynamic page load - allowing pages to be served from an in-memory cache. We run Varnish on our forums and it can do 800 requests/second on a tiny VDS :eek: :)
     
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    webstore

  • #15
    Dominic Taylor said:
    Using webstore.co.uk *As an example of a US hosted site* (not that it shouldn't be in the US, because it's targeting US visitors presumably!) because I know people have recommended US hosts, I don't know where Pingdom tests from but at 5.2s for a simple pageload it's not too snappy. The quickest I got was 4s, on a smaller page.
    Our own site is ~40% larger with ~35% more HTTP requests and loads in under 3 seconds.
    Click to expand...

    Dominic - Many thanks for taking the trouble to run & report the above test on our webstore.co.uk (without www) website.

    Since our US Rackspace CloudServer space is new to us this week, we thought we would see what we could get away with on RAM, CPU etc in order to keep costs down. (The sites we host in the US are all our own Free List sites hosted at our own expense).

    Clearly we do need to increase on RAM, CPU etc and that's the beauty of cloud servers that you can quickly self scale-up (or scale down) on resources (no humans needed) with no set-up costs - whereas our domain www[dot]webstore.co.uk is on a UK dedicated server where humans are needed to make any hardware changes plus there are normally set-up costs.

    What's more with cloud servers we pay for what we use on RAM, CPU, connectivity etc by the hour and there's no contracts except for the rolling 12-month cPanel licence we buy direct from cPanel.

    Just in case any of our UK clients read this, we currently host all our UK clients sites in the UK on several dedicated servers but if testing of cloud servers goes well for us in the US, we might use UK cloud servers in future for our UK clients.

    For anybody needing new hosting facilities, considering using the Cloud could make for an interesting alternative to using dedicated servers. - Ian at Web-Store Ltd
    .
     
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    webstore

  • #17
    Dominic Taylor said:
    Using webstore.co.uk *As an example of a US hosted site* (not that it shouldn't be in the US, because it's targeting US visitors presumably!) because I know people have recommended US hosts, I don't know where Pingdom tests from but at 5.2s for a simple pageload it's not too snappy. The quickest I got was 4s, on a smaller page.Our own site is ~40% larger with ~35% more HTTP requests and loads in under 3 seconds.
    Click to expand...

    Hi Dominic - Once again many thanks for testing webstore.co.uk.

    Last night we doubled our Cloud server RAM which included a doubling of CPU capability and we only had a downtime of 15-secs !!! Our site you tested should run much faster now.

    We recommend to anybody considering getting a dedicated server to give Cloud servers a serious look of which there are several companies in the UK & US offering this service.

    The great thing about the Cloud servers we use, is that we pay for what we actually use in server resources & connectivity by the hour and not a fixed price & contract period as with dedicated.

    Rackspace UK have a handy calculator at
    rackspace.co.uk/cloud-hosting/learn-more/cloud-servers-cost-calculator/
    and their UK prices are not much different to Rackspace US.

    Ian at Web-Store Ltd
    .
     
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    Dominic Taylor

    Free Member
    Jun 19, 2008
    1,173
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    Bath
  • #20
    webstore said:
    Last night we doubled our Cloud server RAM which included a doubling of CPU capability and we only had a downtime of 15-secs !!! Our site you tested should run much faster now.
    Click to expand...
    That's great to see....don't try resizing disk in the day though as it can take a little time (afaik they use Xen)!

    The only issue I have with this sort of thing though is that you have to bother worrying about it in the first place but I guess that's the whole point of cloud (in terms of scalable VDSs) - it allows you as the client to choose how much to spend at any given point in time.
     
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    jml256

    Free Member
    Jan 25, 2011
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  • #28
    Bill1954 said:
    The servers must be able to host asp with an access database, uptime must be at least 99% and we need webspace of about 10gb (currently we only have 1gb and we have already exceeded it.
    Any reccomendations will be gratefully received
    Click to expand...

    It's important to note that with 99% uptime, you would be on the receiving end of Downtime of 7 hours 26 minutes 24 seconds during August alone, almost a working day! - is that acceptable?

    The Wikipedia High Availability article has the following table on uptime calculations:

    Availability % Downtime/year Downtime/month* Downtime/week

    99% ("two nines") 3.65 days 7.20 hours 1.68 hours

    99.5% 1.83 days 3.60 hours 50.4 minutes

    99.8% 17.52 hours 86.23 minutes 20.16 minutes

    99.9% ("three nines") 8.76 hours 43.2 minutes 10.1 minutes

    99.95% 4.38 hours 21.56 minutes 5.04 minutes

    99.99% ("four nines") 52.56 minutes 4.32 minutes 1.01 minutes

    99.999% ("five nines") 5.26 minutes 25.9 seconds 6.05 seconds

    99.9999% ("six nines") 31.5 seconds 2.59 seconds 0.605 seconds
     
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