Will Dreamhost work for my network?

Hey there,

I have been reading up a lot on Dream Host and honestly I truly am finding it hard to believe the amount of storage and bandwith that you get!

Over the last 4 years that I have had my network online I have always been told that I needed to have dedicated hosting! So for the last 4 years I have been busting my BUTT trying to bring in the $300 per month server fees by PIMPING out ads all over my sites. Lately it is getting tiresome always trying to make ends meat with the high costs of running the network on its own server!

I think what bothers me the most is that I am truly BRAIN dead when it comes to all the TECH stuff and I am at the mercy of others that know more about it... anyways... here is my Network information and maybe some nice TECHIE person can help me FINALLY understand what is really needed for my network and now I can make it all work out for us.

Quick Stats
VB Forum - Over 70K users and over 1 million posts
Gallery - Over 200,000 images and growing
Average users online: 400 - 500
Peak users online: 900


Network Info
- Average about 500 gigs bandwidth used per month with peak times at 900 gigs.

- Current Storage, Disk Space Usage 12297.27 Megabytes MySQL Disk Space 1391.82 Megabytes

- We have a total of 20 domains on our network (1 main site www.devotedfansnetwork.com and the rest are just forwarding/redirect links to subpages set up within VB Forum. http://www.devotedfansnetwork.com/index.php?page=smallville)

- Our network is set up with VB forums CMS. So all of our sites content is within the VB forums (article system) and there are miminal pages created outside of this.

- We do NOT host media files such as MP3, AVI or MPEGS on our server so we do not have too much file downloading.

- Currently we are using VB gallery which we will be converting to Coppermine gallery shortly. Our gallery hosts over 200,000 images and growning. I am told HALF of our bandwidth and resources goes towards our gallery!

There I think that is most of what I need to tell you? Please let me know if there are any other questions that might help you figure out what is best for my network.

Oh... and so you know we are on the following...

https://www.layeredtech.com

Base System Configuration:
2 x 2.8GHz Intel XEON
2 x 73GB SCSI HDD (10K RPM)
2048MB ECC RAM
Bandwidth: 1200GB
IP Addresses: 8 (5 usable)
Private VLAN
Basic Resource Monitoring
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Windows*
100% Self Managed and Dedicated
275 | $99 Setup

Thanks for your help,

Happiness
www.devotedfansnetwork.com

It should work but may be not as fast as a dedicated server.

Honestly I barely find the DS to be that fast anyways....

So which of the plans would you recommend then? I mean again sounds too good to be true with the level 1 plan...

Low-end shared hosting isn't appropriate for most sites this size at this level of activity. While the disk space and bandwidth might look good, where you'll really take a hit is in database performance, which it sounds like you rely on heavily.

Stick with a dedicated server or save some money (and possibly get better performance) by splitting your sites over a couple virtual servers.

I was thinking on actually splitting up the Gallery and the Forum which are really the only two things on our network that can be split up. All of the sites are really virtual sites since they run from the forum with CMS.

IF I did split up the Gallery and the Forum then I would have the following....

1 Coppermine Gallery with over 200,000 images

1 VB forum with over 1 million posts and 70,000 users with peaks of 900 members online at one time

Does Dreamhost have sites that have that kind of usage already? I mean I know that there are TONS of sites out there that have VB boards well into the millions of posts and galleries just as big as mine... and my question has always been.... HOW do they do that?

H

Hi happiness.

Some people do worry about the services DH promises.

Why not just sign up a plan and try it out. DH provides 97-day money-back guarantee. You will get full refund if you feel DH is not the one you are looking for.

Please note: the hosting plan comes with a free domain. If you register a free domain, DH will refund all but the domain name. It means you will get full refund but not 9.90 for the free domain.

I agree with kchrist, stay with your dedicated server or shop around for a cheaper dedicated offer. I think moving your network to any kind of shared hosting will cause you more problems, not less.

Mark

You can always ask support and they will give you their honest opinion but I'm pretty sure that going from dedicated to shared will absolutely drive your users nuts.

With shared servers performance becomes dependent on the others sharing with you. The DB is shared the web server is shared and so on.

BUT - DH might be able to come up with a dedicated solution for you as they just freed up some room. It's certainly worth asking them about it. (And I would bet that if they don't feel that they can take you that they would have a couple good and reliable recommendations)

Wholly

Hello,

Happiness, check your private message and check if my offer intrests you.