How much horsepower am I gonna need to run this site?
 

OK, so as some of you who have been paying attention may have noticed, I am in the midst of getting an e-commerce site up and running for a friend. The site is essentially working, but now I am embroiled in the search for a host. He expects the site to be serving approximately 500-1000 "views" a day (a view is visiting the frontpage and then viewing a long article that is prepared daily), with peaks of 2000-4000. The site is written with PHP and uses mySQL to store all of the data. Most of these hits will be in the morning. There are other queries being run as well--users logging in, a news section, etc.

I can easily find a host that will accomodate the space and bandwidth needs, but the question I have is one of processor usage: how much is that mySQL usage gonna hit the host? I dont want to wake up one morning to find the account suspended because we were killing the rest of the server while mySQL fetched thousands of articles for people. Ive never had to deal with this problem before--everything else I have written has gone on my own personal server and doesnt get that many hits.

I know that ideally we would have a dedicated server, but until things are up and running, he doesnt want to commit upwards of $100 a month for hosting, and I dont blame him.

Suggestions? How much hurt is this thing gonna put on a box? Am I going to have to get a dedicated box anyways? Any suggestions for a host?

1and1 offers dedicated server packages starting at $49/month

I use their dedicated server one packages and have never had a processor problem running multible forums, databases, and about 450 e-mail accounts.

http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Ser...a?__frame=_top

Thanks for the link. I would, however, prefer to avoid using a dedicated server at least until the site is up and running.

Most hosts will get pretty upset if you eat too much CPU time.. You should look for an e-com package, but unfortunately those are rather expensive in most cases, as companies know that CPU time is a larger issue with them than with, say, a picture host.

I would send any prospective host an e-mail and let them know what you'll be needing from them, and asking them point blank if they can meet it. Most hosts will be upfront with you if they don't wish to have that kind of load on their servers.

based on what you said about the PHP and MySQL, you should definitely check out doteasy's hosting plans.

http://www.doteasy.com

i use them for ALL my web projects now, exclusively.

Instead of generating the pages every single time, you should consider server-side caching, where you generate the page once every long while, and cache the output somewhere, and use that for a while instead. Because a 486 running linux can fill up a 10mbit ethernet line serving static content, so anything you can make static, or static-ish (not reading from db, not doing much processing at all) will really, really help.

Thats a pretty interesting concept--I havent thought about that. How difficult is it to implement?

Yeah, I figured they wouldnt be too happy if I sucked up too much CPU time. I guess Ill shoot them an email (right now looking at surpasshosting.com) and ask.

Ill give them a look.

Keep the suggestions coming yall, this is lots of help :)