Hosting Advice & Concerns..

Hi everybody i just want to say great community I love elgg.

Does anybody have good hosting advice?  I’m concern with the abilities to host an elgg site.. 

The two companies recommended by elgg seem to only allow a limited amount of users logged in at one time.  

In another post user Dhrupdescoop stated that a 100 dollar hosting plan would only allow around 50 users at once..  Our site is for a local university and has growing support in popularity.  We expect to have at least 200 users logged in at one time.. What company or hosting plant would anybody here recommend? I’m sure your all aware of elggs hosting limitations do to it using apache as php.. 


  • @DhrupDeScoop Nothing special about my hosting, I've been using Arvixe for One year, two months and never had any simultaneous users problem.

    I've been working with them for only three months =)

    Remember way back when I started with www.milocker.com (Jan 2010)? I had 10-20 simultaneous users (or more) and no problems whatsoever (even when people were uploading pictures and using that heavy elgg bottom bar chat), and I was not working with them.   

    They times that milocker was down was my fault, when I was testing new code hehe

     

    Rodolfo Hernandez

    Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison

     

     

     

     

  • omg...this is awesome to hear Rodolfo, I have been stressing about this all day...thanks for putting my mind at rest ^__^

  • As I said B4....

    Things like "elgg bottom bar chat" will get you suspended because of the heavy CPU% and MySql usage.. Ask those who have had their accounts suspended before (by Arvixe).

    Yep - you are *lucky. ;-) You seem to be getting VPS performance for the price of cheap shared hosting ;-P

  • Well now I'm a bit of a pickle,  iionly putting my site on the campus server is out of the question since it's not directly associated or yet indorse by the school. Even aware of the recent facts I see no other viable option then to simply try  arvixe and seeing how it goes, until the founds to stream on a dedicated server kick in..  

    Hopefully  rjcalifornia is right..

  • ;-) 10-20 people to stress-test ? there are apache tech tools to go just that on a server. 10, 20 or 1000 users hitting your site at once - then your pudding proves or boils over...

  • Hi Olivia,

    I'm a bit confused by the terms being used in this thread. There is a huge difference between the "number of users logged in at the same time" and the number of "simultaneous users". Simultaneous users are users that submit requests at essentially the exact same time. Given that most people spend 90 percent of their time or more reading or creating content and far less than that clicking around or submitting form contents, it is typically possible to have hundreds or even thousands of logged-in active users on one dedicated server.

  • @Kev, thx for the clarification..

    Elgg's "online users" count (actions within 10 mins) is most probably more realistic. At FBFK we've seen the same counting issue(s). If Elgg's count said 100 - are there not really more users actually logged on and browsing (though not contributing to the [apache] child processes) ?

    I did do some mickeymouse code to scan and count for 15 secs.. up to 1 hour counts of (ELgg) last actions to see what more numbers might be pulled in - to get a better global picture. Maybe an extra counter field "Last Page View" (based of on pagedraw?) will reveal more more info...

  • Like Olivia I am looking for a good solution...  my issue is my client's elgg community has grown exponetially and the current server can't handle the load.

    Currently the site has 1700+ registered users... ~_~

    So is it time for a dedicated server?  I am trying to see how I can get the load down, but the site runs at a snails pace and I can't even log into the site.

  • lolz ;-)

    your problem is most likely not order of magnitude/performance - probably "cheap shared hosting" -- as I've been mindlessly babbling about while no one seems to pay attention because they are all smarter than I am, while I am still "root" as they are "sudo" ;-O

    "exponentially" ? try 210,000 users (http://fbfkids.com) ! 

    Look at your Members Screen "Active" tab - that's the Elgg way of counting online users - if u see around 10-20 +++ and on Shared Host => maybe time for VPS/1-2GB ram etc @ ~$25-99 /mnth ;-)

     

  • @Dhrup: there are even much less sites on one server as you might think: I would say about 30-50 on shared server and (at least at my webhoster) about 8-10 VPS installations. Of course so called "cloud hosting" is slightly different and load balancing between servers results in other numbers - you can't sepatate the servers and installations so easily. The difference in VPS in comparison to shared server is you have separate virtual installations (own Apache, own Mysql server etc. - fully configurable). Each VPS host gets equal CPU share and it's own RAM, so you have a guranteed minimum CPU share at peak times and much more at other times. The only problem is the disc I/O rate that's not offering a minumum share and could be a bottleneck sometimes.

    Alternative to Arvixe: HostUpon.com. VPS cost about $45/month (forget about their shared server as there's a "not more than 10% CPU load for more than 60s" restriction). Support is quite good (there are good guys with good knowledge and (so far I know) one guy with a bit less knowledge...). VPS resources are scalable (RAM, storage) and they also offer VPS on their cloud for dynamical resource needs.

    @Olivia: depending on your budget I would suggest to look for a VPS plan to start with. If VPS is not enough anymore (and the admins have gained more experience) a switch to a dedicated server should easily be possible later.