Hosting Recommendations for High Traffic Site?

Doing anywhere from 20M to 40M pages per month. Right now I’m hosting with Quadranet on a setup that includes one web server running dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 Octa Core with 64GB ram and dual 147GB SA-SCSI 15,000RPM drives and doing mysql with four servers, two select-only slaves, one master, and a stat-keeping server.

I’ve switched to FreeBSD/NGINX in hopes to improve uptime.

In short, my uptime is about 94%, and I need it 99.9% or 100%. Thinking of alternate options, including cloud hosting. Any recommendations?

Cheers!
Ryan

i would suggest rackspace they are the best
their dedicated servers gurantee 100% Network Uptime Guarantee
https://www.rackspace.com/managed-hosting/dedicated-servers/

There is no such thing as 100% uptime.

94% isn’t a great result: what’s the primary cause of the downtime? If there’s an issue with the structure of your application, then moving host might not provide better results.

Spending $7k+ on hosting I expect as close to 100% as I can get.

So the solution I found was to take a lot of stress off the primary web server by having a CDN handle cacheing our image assets, which are typically generated on the fly with GD Library. With the CDN taking care of 8 million requests per day, it’s helped the server to (so far) remain without issue.

Cheers
Ryan

Glad it’s working better. In the longer term it’d also be worth looking at a load balancer and multiple web servers to provide some extra redundancy.

With regards to outlay on hosting, my experience with web hosts (even high reputation ones such as rackspace) on high volume sites is that they’ll happily take large sums of money for both 24/7 premium support (they’ll reboot things within seconds but not investigate why it needs rebooted) and vertical scaling of resources (bigger and faster servers), but rarely will suggest sensible architectural changes such as load balancers, caching proxies, query optimizations, and server configuration options, unless pressed by the technically adept.

I would also go for rackspace. It is reliable. Go for it.

I have good experience with Rackspace.

The solution I mentioned earlier is still working solid. I have the CDN handling all images (taking millions of impressions daily off of GD Library), javascript, css, json. Anywhere from 30 million to 42 million impressions per day are going to the CDN now instead of my web server. My bandwidth on my primary web server (I have 4 mysql servers supporting it) dropped from about 110mbit/s to 10 mbit/s, so savings in bandwidth overages now also.

Cheers
Ryan

I am using DigitalOcean since last 8 months and it is handling 30,000 daily page views very easily.

<snip>

Yeah, I know an ecommerce site using DigitalOcean and they have been happy with the service.

You can spend 100k and still you won’t find 100% up-time. 99.9% is quite max.
If you find 100% probably they lie so might consider this contract: you pay the money for 100% and if it’s down you get paid by them.
And from the sum you are paying on the hosting … I think you can do this if up time is less then 98% ( example )

I agree with you on the 100%, and 99.9% is always the pitch, but we’re talking hours daily on a high-traffic site and you are taking tens of thousands of people upset. It just wasn’t acceptable. But everything good now.