SecNam

just looking for people ideas/reccon on best uk hosts to host a quite big website with thousands of products on.

Im using PT and still yet to find a good host as the mysql is very big and the site is lagging.
I have tried splitting the dbs but no good.

thanks in advance.

monaghan

The problem with shared hosting is just that... you have to share resources and you only have to be sitting on the same host as someone with a badly optimised database and your performance drops as well. I had a customer who was using a WP plugin that queried a large forum database with a non-keyed query on every page load, performance was of course pants.

If you have a very large database and you need high performance, then I'd suggest using a dedicated server and popping the database on a different physical disk to the web server and application code. Throw a good chunk of RAM for the database server to use as a cache. If it is really big, then you can look at splitting the tables over multiple disks, but that's extreme optimisation for most cases and you really need to understand the structure and data movements around the application to determine what's best.

Often you will find that you can start on a lowly populated server, then as the host sells more packages, your fast server will slow down.

Are all your queries optimised so that they use an index? Is the field list and the WHERE clause restricting to just the data you need? Are your indexes optimal for the queries you are running? If not these simple steps will improve your performance significantly.

__________________
Alex Monaghan - Drop Catch & Drop Lists - PM for details
Online Accounting|Pine Furniture|Barbie

nick-harper

How many products / queries are you talking?

Blossom

Yes, agree with monaghan. Dedi or VPS is better for that kind of thing.

__________________
Jenni | Blossom | Video Tutorials

jimm

Shared hosting may be acceptable for starting off untill it gets really busy. Just dont get a £10 per year account, actually get a decent account which provides decent limits. Shameless self plug but we offer premium shared accounts which give a lot more of a server for each account (ie large server with a low number of accounts on) but they actually cost a lot more than a basic shared account. This means you get the server looked after like a shared server so no overheads there and you have the huge burst-ability of a large dedi without the cost. This usually works out a lot better for most than a small to medium vps!

__________________
Fov.cc | EvoOwners.co.uk | Forget Debt | xFTP | Jaimee | Linux Book | ESE Pods | Music Quotes
Affordable Server Admin - PM me!

monaghan

A VPS is only as good as the loading on the host node, you can easily get the same issues on a VPS as you get on an overloaded shared hosting node.

Dedicated or quality shared hosting is the only way.

If you have a critical site and depend on it for your income, then go somewhere where you know they will manage the loads properly or go down the dedicated route and either way be prepared to pay for a "proper job".

__________________
Alex Monaghan - Drop Catch & Drop Lists - PM for details
Online Accounting|Pine Furniture|Barbie

SecNam

sorry for delay in answering.

i am on cloud hosting, 4gb ram, 3cpu etc so there is only me on it and only affects me. products is just over 1 million (as using feeds from affiliate window) and also using price tapestry.

namestrands

I would go for a Dedicated Server Running FREEBSD for large database sites. One of our servers that has the entire TLD zone file database on it and is running 24/7 for serps and such.. 95 Million Records. Not a problem.

Company - RapidSwitch.com

__________________

SecNam

thanks, will take a look today..

jimm

Unless you know what you are doing with FreeBSD dont go that route!
Its not an OS you can just have a go with and expect it to run well.
It can be a very stable OS, when run right but it does bite (and so does the user community ).
The server you have now should be able to handle that size db unless the db is a mess, in which case just throwing more and more hardware at isnt really a good option.

__________________
Fov.cc | EvoOwners.co.uk | Forget Debt | xFTP | Jaimee | Linux Book | ESE Pods | Music Quotes
Affordable Server Admin - PM me!