Short term hosting

[DrApple]

Anyone know a good service for hosting a possible high traffic website for a month or two?

Currently the site is with VentraIP. Due to an upcoming promotion we expect temporary high traffic.

We contacted VentraIP to find out what upgrade options they have. They recommended a VPS but have no availability at the moment. They also said our account would be suspended if it overloads the existing hosting.

We have no idea what traffic to expect but it is a substantial prize and will be promoted in Coles and Woolworths.

 

[chris]

Hi DrApple, I'd contact Bulletproof (http://www.bulletproof.net.au) or Anchor (http://www.anchor.com.au) and explain what you want to do. YMMV and I'm not sure if they will do short term VPS' but worth a shot.

Cheers,
Chris

 

[smee]

Most VPS providers are pay by the month, may be not the top end ones mentioned by chris though.

 

[Joel]

You can get a month by month VPS from plenty of Australian providers. A good place to start is vpsau.com

Feel free to get in touch if you need assistance in setting up a secure VPS.

 

[DrApple]

Thanks for the advice. What about scalable cloud hosting? Even a VPS could hit a load max although at least it would stop the site taking out my other hosted accounts. I had a quick look at Rackspace options but haven't seen their pricing or picked a particular product yet.

 

[atom]

I have no experience/knowledge of these guys, but they do list cloud based plans by the month so may be worth contacting.

http://www.lazucloud.com.au

 

[BenWalker]

I use Mediatemple's dedicated virtual servers.
http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/

I have the exact same issue as you where I receive large amount of traffic periodically. And this plan is perfect because its very scalable.

For example, im normally on the $150 plan. Then when Im expecting a surge, I upgrade to the $750 plan for example for a couple of days. Then move it back to $150. I only pay pro rata for the few days I've used it. The rest gets credited back automatically.

My only warning is, if you don’t have an in-house computer guy, don’t use them. Because their system is somewhat complicated and took me a while to get use to.

Hope that helps!

 

[VentraIP]

Hi Dr Apple,

Can I ask what service you use with us now, and how much traffic you expect? Our Business plans are capable of handling a fair thrashing, but it really does depend on how your website is coded (for example, PHP scripts are not including a million different files, etc).

 

[Ash]

I might be showing my naivety here but would the $20/month plan with squarespace be worth investigating... they offer unlimited bandwidth and if you're on wordpress it could be quite a simple process to temporarily migrate to their service?

Disclaimer: I'm not speaking from experience as I haven't used their service but I am tempted to give it a shot myself.

Having said that, VentraIP's Economy Plus plan indicates unlimited monthly data transfer... Am I missing a piece of this puzzle?

 

[sp@rky13]

The issue isn't bandwidth or storage in this case, but in/out traffic as well as processing power.

 

[thelostagency]

Maybe also look at serving images via Amazon CloudFront and even CloudFlare could help you manage with the spike no matter which platform you choose. Just don't go shared services, I know VPS.net has Elastic VPS and last month launched AU nodes which are located in Equinix in Melbourne, Australia which could give you what you need on a month to month basis.

 

[smee]

The issue isn't bandwidth or storage in this case, but in/out traffic as well as processing power.

This is a competition they are looking at hosting for, a competition apparently being promoted in Woolworths and Coles. I doubt there will be sudden spikes requiring big CPU power. If it was a competition being mentioned on A Current Affair for example, there could be a sudden spike, but it's not going to happen via in store promotion. The competition website lottos.com.au didn't appear to suffer CPU or access issues after featuring on A Current Affair last week, so a VPS should be overly adequate.

 

[DrApple]

Hi Dr Apple,

Can I ask what service you use with us now, and how much traffic you expect? Our Business plans are capable of handling a fair thrashing, but it really does depend on how your website is coded (for example, PHP scripts are not including a million different files, etc).

I have a reseller+ account. I don't know how much traffic to expect, it might not be an issue but don't want to get caught out.

The marketting company are aiming for a viral campaign that will run to February next year. They are distributing 250k entry forms and the competition involves inviting Facebook friends to vote. They have 2 Facebook pages that have weekly reach of 50k and 75k prior to the competition.

I don't want to end up in a panic trying to fix hosting issues when they are running their campaign and I don't want to risk interfeering with my other hosted websites performance or get suspended.

 

[smee]

The marketing company aren't worried about brand integrity then? Any Facebook voting competition is wide open to abuse, including using fivrr, freelance etc. to pay for votes, or international vote exchange sites.

http://www.lottos.com.au/competitions-blog/

In any case, it sounds like it's a Facebook competition, so your host issues are non existant.

 

[DrApple]

The marketing company aren't worried about brand integrity then? Any Facebook voting competition is wide open to abuse, including using fivrr, freelance etc. to pay for votes, or international vote exchange sites.

http://www.lottos.com.au/competitions-blog/

In any case, it sounds like it's a Facebook competition, so your host issues are non existant.

They have already considered that. After a certain number of votes entries go to judges for final decision.

The photos are hosted on the website not on Facebook. We have integrated Facebook like buttons with the photos on the website.

 

[smee]

They have already considered that. After a certain number of votes entries go to judges for final decision.

So still open to being abused. Anyhow, I'm off topic. Good luck with the hosing decision.

 

[VentraIP]

Hi DrApple,

Have you considered using a service like CloudFlare? That will handle the traffic perfectly and prevent the website going offline/suspended in most cases. The free version works well, but if you need SSL's and subdomains use the paid version. It is available inside of your cPanel account.

A lot of our customers are now using CloudFlare to help with traffic spikes and it's doing wonders for them.

 

[DrApple]

Thanks. I did notice it in Cpanel but wasn't familiar with it. I will look at it more closely.