Commercial grade webhosting?

Hi all - I'm the IT guy at work (well I'm the IT department), and I'm good at what I do... servers, databases, etc. We are switching our internet provider form a local DSL company to a fractional T1 (which will also bundle our phone services) from TDS (phone company in the great lakes area).

Our current DSL provider is also our webhost, and as such, we need a new one. Here's where I'm not so hot. I don't have enough experience with web hosting to pick a good one, and a good plan. The site isn't crazy popular, we get about 3,000 page views per day, and about 40,000 file hits a day. It's pretty level traffic, but spikes a tad on a couple days (say 45,000 hits on the busiest day of the week).

We don't use a ton of bandwidth, but our current hosts reporting software doesn't meter our bandwidth (one of the many many reasons we are switching). The whole site comes in around 200 megs (I'm very careful about making sure people re-compress all their images, etc before uploading them) spread out across a large number of pages. I'm GUESSING that we use around 100gb per month.

So, what I need is a host that can handle our kind of traffic without breaking the bank (we're a fairly small, non-profit conservation agency in Michigan... every penny counts). I'm sure one of the "semi-dedicated" servers (3-4 sites on one machine) could handle it no problem, but I have a gut feeling it would be overkill. Again, I just don't have the experience to be sure that a larger shared hosting plan would cut it.

We also need SSL and the ability to forward our MX record to our Exchange server would be nice, but I could work around that if I had to. PHP, MySQL are also a needed, along with some decent traffic and demographic reporting software.

Anyone have ANY advice for me?

THANKS!

doucy2 said:

i might have a good company for you
i'll let you know

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Please do... we're looking to switch in about 4-5 weeks from now, so I'd like to get all the business side of things taken care of withing the next 3 weeks.

Also, just for reference, the different plans/pricings I have looked at so far are shared plans from $15-30 per month (loosk good on paper, plenty of bandwidth and storage space, just concerned about concurrent user load), and semi-dedicated service for $75 (plenty of everythig, just a tad pricey for what I think we could get by with).

PlaceofDis said:

i know A Small Orange is highly recommended here. although they are shared hosting. they seem to be very reliable. i am using them myself now too. good support forums and help.

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I checked out their site, an while it looked nice and the prices fair, I was immediately put off by the lack of a phone number, even for sales!

HostMySite.com looks like a pretty good package; but the monthly bandwidth looks a little anemic.

I did a little research, and I was wondering if anyone has used Yahoo's small business hosting before? From what I have read there are some popular blogs hosted on those plans that have survived Slashdottings, thanks to Yahoo's massive amount servers. That kind of traffic is an order of magnitude over what I need, so it seems like it should do. Their prices are decent, not great, but I'm more interested in a fair price with good reliability (both customer service and technical). Plus, they offer ColdFusion support, which is not a requirement but a really nice perk.

Anwyays, anyone every use that service?

ipacmm said:

I can host it for you. PM me if you want some more info. I can do dedicated servers on either Xserver's or Window Server 2003 Servers. Let me know if you are interested.

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Thanks for the offer... I checked the site in your sig, and looked at the packages. 100gb per month is likely the minimum we would need, and looks like your packages top out at 30 or 40gb.

Lau said:

One thing I would say about A Small Orange is that they have always responded to my email support queries very quickly - ie in between 5 minutes and an hour (the hour was when a whole server was down). I've heard of some hosts taking 24 hours to respond, so I can see why you would be wary of web-only support, but they have always been very quick for me. They also have good forums. Having said that, each to their own, so if phone support is what you want, no worries, and ignore this post!

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Thanks for the heads up on this company, btw. I'm moving my personal site over there me thinks. Just trying to decide if I wanna grab up the lifetime hosting deal they are offering right now.

superbovine said:

How much bandwidth you getting from your fractional T1? Why not host it in house? maybe go for more bandwidth? your are already going to have a router and switch, you just need servers and maybe a load balancer.

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It's half a T1, so 768kbps up/down. Not hosting our own for a bunch or reasons, mainly it's just cheaper to do it somewhere else, when you figure hardware costs, and then add in the fact that we would HAVE to hire someone else. (I am the only IT staff in the place, and I also handle our internal database (about 1.2 gb SQL database) and also our membership billing. I do 2 fulltime jobs, basically.

Thanks for the tips, I will keep them in mind.

superbovine said:

sorry, i assumed you had servers laying around

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Hehe, no prblem. Our DB server has enough leftover power to host a website but that would be pretty stupid, from a security standpoint. Our domain server is also a file server and exchange server, and is pretty old so tacking another service onto it would be a bit much; plus it'd be just as bad for security as putting it right on the DB server - they are on the same subnet and seperated only by a gigabit switch.

If we did it internally we would have to put it on it's own server that was on it's own subnet behind it's own firewall... at least that's my opinion/understanding.