how to host a website with 7K/day - 30K/day traffic

[dailypress]

hello,

I am transferring a site with 7000 visitors/day to my server. I was wondering what kind of hosting account I would need to manage such traffic. The site has reached 30K visitors.day for a specific week and had 2 spikes of over 70,000 visitors/day.

Can you please PM me a few names of good servers, their cost and etc...

Im not new to the web business but don't know much about servers. I have been mostly handling 1-2K visitors/day. I'm excited and nervous on how to manage 7k-30k/day.

thanks,
DP

[mack]

One option open to you is to try and minimize the total bandwidth. This depends on the specific site, but by simply cleaning up code you can reduce the page sizes quite considerably.

Ages ago I used a CMS that created static files. It was template driven and bandwidth was indeed getting to be an issue. By simply removing whitespace from the template files I was able to see a bandwidth drop of 20% with traffic levels remaining constant.

The same applies to dynamic sites. If you can reduce the overall file size of a page load you will be able to serve more pages without the huge leap in bandwidth.

Its something well worth taking into consideration.

Mack.

[Hoople]

+1 to mack's comment.

I was working on speeding up a blog and found a social recommendation widget was making referrals to every site it had a button for. It took *lots* of time to ratchet thru that list and then let the sever go on to serving subsequent content.

I shaved a considerable overhead by changing to a widget that used a common image sprite for the social icons.

[techmaster]

Make your web pages as simple as you can because formatting and use of graphics will increase the file size and gallop the bandwidth. Or you will have to invest more to increase your bandwidth limits to handle this situation properly.

[damon_cool]

There are a bunch of caching techniques you can use depending on the technology stack you use for your site.

Another alternative is to use a CDN like cloudflare. I have no first hand experience with them specifically. Google CDN and you'll find out more.

[topr8]

it's a pretty open ended question dailypress!

i shouldn't have thought bandwidth was much of an issue with the allowances most hosts give nowadays.

assuming the site is dynamic then optimising the sql queries is the most important thing that you can do. then caching of some sort if you have pages that are complicated to build.

as a reference i've run a 1,000,000 page view a month site on an old westhost VPS which had no problems handling it (although i'm no longer with them)

... then again a mid level dedicated server could choke on less than that if you are running an inefficient cms/forum whatever.

[StoutFiles]

Bandwidth is hardly an issue. Most shared servers have a maximum connection allowance that is pretty easy to go over on. Of course they never tell you about that when they entice you with their unlimited* bandwidth.

Get a dedicated server and account for 24-48 hours of downtime as you get nameservers switched over. Research how to do a server switch beforehand so you don't encounter any more downtime than necessary.