Hi all,
I wonder if you can help - I'd would also like to apologise in advance if this turns out to be at all long-winded.
I am, by trade, a front-end web developer. I use Drupal 7 in my day job and in the last year or so was able to relaunch what used to be a traditional LAMP Zend PHP Site as a Drupal 7 site. I did all the configuration and theming, but had some help building a couple of custom modules for some specific editorial requirements.
I thought it would therefore be well within my ability to build a website for a friend, using Drupal 7. They currently have a wordpress blog - I've been able to import all the content, build a directory system and get some sweet responsive design happening so it looks good on multiple devices.
But the project is slowly going off the rails due to where I am currently hosting it. And I'm not sure if there's a solution to keep my client happy.
Check out my work in progress here: http://95.138.187.151/
I started the project on Pantheon, because they offered a free sandbox environment which I could get started in without having to incur hosting charged while I build - this was important because I only have limited time to work on the project - obviously the best thing to have done would be to work on it in a local environment, but I wanted to be able to show my client progress etc and I honestly didn't see the project dragging on this long!
Anyway - it became apparent that the amount of disk space Pantheon were offering for a live production environment wasn't going to be sufficent, so I began investigating Amazon S3 and a means of storing media files. I experimented with a couple of different modules and couldn't get either working. I then looked into Rackspace as a possible CDN solution, then found out they had their own Drupal Distribution. The minimum server build was 512k RAM/20GB Storage - so I went for this configuration and moved the site over to the new hosting.
The process was simple enough, but the performance was ABYSMAL, slowing the project down even further. I raised it with their customer support and they told me that MySQL was crashing because the server didn't have enough RAM. They suggested that I reconfigure the server with 1gb RAM. I did this and the performance was better, but still not ideal. With the basic configuration it was coming in at about £20 a month. With the 1gb RAM upgrade it was closer to £30.
Over time it has got worse and when I recently raised it with them again they said I need to either:
a) Reconfigure the server again with more RAM - I've gone back to the client with this and they said £40 a month is too much.
b) Hire a professional to reconfigure the server instead of throwing more RAM at the problem - no idea how much this will cost
c) Upgrade my support level to a managed cloud for an extra $65 a month
Clearly none of the scenarios are acceptable, so it's looking like I'm gonna have to move the site again. My question is this: Are these kinds of overheads normal for a drupal site? My client will need a large amount of hosting space because they are quite an image intensive site, but they will likely only have a modest amount of trafffic. They are a local small business, so they were only looking at about £20 a month for hosting. Can anyone think of somewhere I could move the site that would fit the requirements? Only I think left to my own devices I have gravitated towards these large enterprise level firms who I think are a bit out of our price range.
I hope someone can help!
Rob Howard.
Comments
That does sound like a large
That does sound like a large amount of RAMM. Some site or server config issue seems the most likely cause here.
Have you enabled Drupal caching?
I've PM'd you as I'm quite intrigued. :-)