Hi, I currently have sites on the Namesco web cluster and they are performing well in that I have not suffered any downtime or performance issues, but to be fair they are not exactly under any significant load (according to my traffic stats monitors).
Anyhoo, I am working on a web app and want to be able to factor in the cost of hosting as part of the project budget. I expect this application will be frequent on the 'ol ajax calls to apache/mysql/external web services via PHP. At the moment the level of usage over time is something I cannot determine, so would rather get something in place now that would be able to manage scalability in terms of number of users and activity. E.g. I do not want to click on a button in the web interface someday and have an ajaxLoad icon swirling away with nothing happening while javascript "waits" for the server to get back to it, just because there are possible a few thousand people using the application at once.
So I came across the idea of Cloud hosting. Is this the sort of thing that I should be going after? My understanding is that with Cloud hosting resources given to the application are done so dynamically and based on active demand. That is ideal.
I use Linux (am doing so right now), but I am not a sysadmin in the formal sense. So the idea of unmanaged VPS or dedicated hosting was a bit risky, where as I see for $100 a month Rackspace offer Cloud hosting, admin'ed through a nice web interface. What I want to know is would that be the best type of hosting to suits my needs right now. As this is an application and not a website, SEO isn't exactly a concern. I'd have a seperate SEO'd website for marketing purposes, ideally not on the same server as the application itself.
However my problem is that a lot of what I have right now (access to Namesco's web cluster) markets itself as a cluster that dynamically allocates resources to my "sites/apps" in response to demand guaranteeing 100% uptime. As far as I'm concerned Namesco offer me shared hosting, but I don't know how to benchmark whether or not any hosting package will be ideally able to handle what would be considered a scalable load (until it's too late!).
I'm sure there are command line tools out there that I can run from a Linux shell that will hammer apache and give me some stats, but I doubt very much I would have permission to do that sort of thing to Namesco or any other shared hosting providers servers to see how much they can handle.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
Anyhoo, I am working on a web app and want to be able to factor in the cost of hosting as part of the project budget. I expect this application will be frequent on the 'ol ajax calls to apache/mysql/external web services via PHP. At the moment the level of usage over time is something I cannot determine, so would rather get something in place now that would be able to manage scalability in terms of number of users and activity. E.g. I do not want to click on a button in the web interface someday and have an ajaxLoad icon swirling away with nothing happening while javascript "waits" for the server to get back to it, just because there are possible a few thousand people using the application at once.
So I came across the idea of Cloud hosting. Is this the sort of thing that I should be going after? My understanding is that with Cloud hosting resources given to the application are done so dynamically and based on active demand. That is ideal.
I use Linux (am doing so right now), but I am not a sysadmin in the formal sense. So the idea of unmanaged VPS or dedicated hosting was a bit risky, where as I see for $100 a month Rackspace offer Cloud hosting, admin'ed through a nice web interface. What I want to know is would that be the best type of hosting to suits my needs right now. As this is an application and not a website, SEO isn't exactly a concern. I'd have a seperate SEO'd website for marketing purposes, ideally not on the same server as the application itself.
However my problem is that a lot of what I have right now (access to Namesco's web cluster) markets itself as a cluster that dynamically allocates resources to my "sites/apps" in response to demand guaranteeing 100% uptime. As far as I'm concerned Namesco offer me shared hosting, but I don't know how to benchmark whether or not any hosting package will be ideally able to handle what would be considered a scalable load (until it's too late!).
I'm sure there are command line tools out there that I can run from a Linux shell that will hammer apache and give me some stats, but I doubt very much I would have permission to do that sort of thing to Namesco or any other shared hosting providers servers to see how much they can handle.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
