Web hosting for high traffic site

July 18, 2011 1:57 PM

I am in need of a new web host and would like some suggestions as to what are the best.

I am looking into a new web host for a website that receives about 25,000 visitors/month (with our largest number of visitors in one day being 4,000). We are currently using Amazon EC2 and would like something comparable. Also, we will be posting videos on the site and it needs to be WordPress-friendly. Do you have any web hosting suggestions?

posted by angelaas525 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET
posted by devnull at 2:04 PM on July 18, 2011

If you're finding yourself outgrowing the muscle EC2 has to offer, does that mean you're looking for dedicated/colo options? Instead of throwing more hardware, have you considered optimizing the software end either by modifying WordPress or using something like Varnish? How is your php caching?
posted by Brian Puccio at 2:09 PM on July 18, 2011

Agreeing with Brian. 25k/mo is a drop in the bucket, optimization is your best bet here. I'd usually say to make use of a DBA, but seeing as how you're just using WP I'd go straight to cache-based solutions.
posted by soma lkzx at 2:24 PM on July 18, 2011

Response by poster: The biggest problem we are having is the downtime (19 hrs last month)...We aren't too happy about this and would like a host that is more reliable.
posted by angelaas525 at 2:28 PM on July 18, 2011

There's a serious lack of context here. Why do you want to move? The last two answers seem to be based on performance concerns(and optimizing will never hurt), but there's nothing in the actual question supporting that.
posted by Su at 2:30 PM on July 18, 2011

For smaller sites, I've been recommending Fatcow, but it sounds like you want something beefier. Both my SO and a fairly large non-profit I worked for go with Pair and have found it very reliable - it's been around forever and has quite a good reputation, AFAIK.
posted by Zephyrial at 3:32 PM on July 18, 2011

Best answer: But why was it down 19 hours last month? EC2 had that one well publicized outage, but they are guaranteeing 99.95% availability. If it's application stability issues, changing hosts isn't going to help. I don't know anything about these guys personally, but I do read the blog of the founder, and they created the company specifically to provide high end Wordpress hosting. For that matter, Wordpress.com provides custom hosting for high traffic sites.
posted by COD at 3:43 PM on July 18, 2011

Best answer: This doesn't make any sense. EC2 probably isn't the problem. The company I work for hosts several production sites on EC2 instances and you could add up all of the Amazon-caused downtime on all of the servers (dozens) for the past two years and you'd never even get in the ballpark of 19 hours.

If you're taking down an EC2 instance, what you want is an order of magnitude LESS control because someone in your organization is probably working above their ability level.

If that's the case, we probably need a good bit more detail about what sort of helping hands you need.
posted by toomuchpete at 4:52 PM on July 18, 2011

I just finished evaluating managed WordPress hosting services for a client. These four had solid offerings:

• WP Engine (mentioned by COD above)
• page.ly
• RocketPress.me
• 619 Cloud

All except 619 have offer an SLA.
posted by djb at 6:02 PM on July 18, 2011

Best answer: Issue resolved: After optimizing WP without success, we discovered that Amazon EC2 had been set up with a instance that was too small. So every time we used WP, the available memory was maxed out (which crashed the site for a little while).
posted by angelaas525 at 3:08 PM on October 26, 2011