Need help deciding to use DH-PS
Posted by: Starbuck
Posted on: 2008-07-08 18:08:00
As an existing DH customer, I'm familiar with the servers and I sort of know what to expect. We're making extensive use of Drupal here and plan to do a lot more. But our simple prototype Drupal environment runs like a pig with seltzer/mcgruff serving pages and data respectively. So I'm thinking about moving this part of our site to a pair of small PS servers, one for pages and one for data. Frankly, the hype coming from DH hasn't sold me on the practical aspects of the service.
- Is the performance worth it?
- How tough is it to go for a modest 150MB of RAM and scale up?
- Does DH allow us to maybe start higher, like at 300MB of RAM and scale down?
- All related - can we do a trial and just see how it works out, then cancel if we don't see the benefit?
- How do we know our average/burst resource consumption of CPU/RAM/transfer?
- Can some other customers honestly say PS is just awesome, night and day compared to shared space, etc?
- Is there a place where PS people hang out to discuss their happiness and woes?
- I know we are required to purchase a standard account in addition to PS. I already have it obviously. Are we actually allowed to use our existing shared space for shared http and use PS for our dynamic purposes, persistent processes, etc?
I think I need to optimize our usage of Drupal and MySQL first, and _then_ put it all on PS to get a good benchmark, but:
- What's the best way to get metrics now so that I can do a fair comparison and assess Value for $ spent? Ideally I'd like to run some operations now, quantify them, run the same ops on a low-grade PS, quantify results, then upgrade, and see exactly what we're getting for the money.
- Is it a reasonable assumption that DH optimizes the shared servers as much as possible, and the PS servers too, so no additional LAMP-level optimization should be required on these servers? I'm guessing this isn't true but there's only so much we can do on shared hosts anyway.
And on to the tough question: We can get PS services similar to this DH offering from other vendors. Why is the DHPS offering compelling? I can get root access to my own Linux environment for the same base $15/month. I get the freedom of being able to install and remove anything I want at /etc, /var, /usr, etc, and to run persistent cron jobs. But I also need to manage Apache and MySQL in my own space. I don't want to be a sysadmin, it takes enough time to keep a website functional. With DHPS, I can't load my own software, but DH does do the admin. So what else are they doing to get my business compared to the competition? (Funny monthly newsletters not included...)
Thanks!