Estate agent network and servers required?

[jimmc]

Hi All,

My question is about servers, particularly vps, dedicated, or cloud???
What's best taking into account - cost, stability, security?

What's best for a fast growing online estate agent,
Does anyone have any idea, or have worked on sites for clients, bespoke or even wordpress/
All I'm trying to do in view fo the way there sites gobble up width, picsfloorplansns, pdfs, etc, etc to get a handle on

If anyone knows of any large UK businesses and what they're running on that would be great!

Thanks,
Jim.

 

[RobM]

If you can maintain a server yourself I would go dedicated. I have used providerservice.com for years on some of my servers for websites and for a low cost, if you manage it yourself, you have a system than you can secure, is as stable as you want it, and you have complete control. Throw on cpanel/whm there and you can easily install hundreds of scripts such as wordpress etc. However a lot of 3rd party scripts are insecure and often easily defaced/hacked so you need to keep on top of it.

 

[Adam H]

Like Rob said dedicated would be your ideal option, but costs depend on what your abilities and additional precautions you are putting in place such as off server backup, separate DNS, server admin if required.

Or you could just go completely managed and migrate to a bigger setup if/when required.

 

[jimmc]

Thanks Rob,

I know a lot of estate agents run on proprietary software but this is bespoke although it's taken way too long. So apart from the servers, I'm also currently trying to find a really switched on coder who knows the property market and these kind of back-ends they need to help manage things going forward.

 

[jimmc]

Thanks for your input Adam,

Dedicated might be best but lots of this market sector moving more and more to putting everything on the cloud?

 

[monaghan]

I'm guessing you are going to need the potential to expand your file systems as you go so you can cope with all the additional photos / floor plans. Have you scoped the storage requirements? A VPS / Dedicated may have upper limits on the number of physical disks that can be attached (unless you look a local NAS for expansion), however, a hybrid solution may work out well with the server building the pages with the large volume content being delivered from the cloud / CDN.

 

[jimmc]

Great advice monaghan as I'm sure we will need to expand quickly but without any perceivable interruption the changeover might have that affects agents or the public. We're in pre-launch right now, so we can probably go vps, then dedicated but what then if we run out of space?

This is why I mentioned the cloud as it seems online estate agency is moving that way and I don't want to get caught looking at massive server changes but always with the thought in mind of reigning in costs right now?

 

[monaghan]

I'd personally build the system so that the main database and control / search logic is on your systems, the actual content needed for this will be quite low in comparison to the entire dataset, however, the storage and ability to deliver large volumes of photos may overwhelm a single server, hence using separate content delivery servers (whether via your own systems or a 3rd party cloud based system)

 

[bensd]

http://expertagent.co.uk/