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By Samat Jain on
I've been wanting to launch a managed Drupal hosting service for a while: you pay a certain monthly/quarterly/yearly fee and get your own shared Drupal installation, with selection of pre-installed modules, themes, and security update and maintenance--you don't worry about anything other than getting your site up and working and creating both content and community.
There's one detail I have not figured out yet: what's a good metric to limit such hosting plans?
With conventional web hosting, space and bandwidth are usually the primary metric that are sold at each tier of service. I don't think this works well with Drupal: Drupal generally does not use that much space or bandwidth. What it does use is CPU, which is something that is very difficult to measure for a hosting provider.
I am thinking that a good metric is the number of online, active users. Does this seem reasonable?
What are people's opinions on this? I'm looking forward to any insight that anyone has!
Comments
CPU and memory
Drupal can be a bandwidth hog, if your clients use the video, audio, or media modules.
But, in general, it is CPU and memory that will limit you before you run out of diskspace or bandwidth.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
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Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba
> But, in general, it is CPU
> But, in general, it is CPU and memory that will limit you
> before you run out of diskspace or bandwidth.
Right. But, with an efficient Apache/mod_php/virtual hosting setup, measuring CPU and memory usage can be difficult.
Any opinions on Drupal features/characteristics (e.g. number of users online) that would be a better thing to measure?
I'm wondering how Bryght manages this. Do they charge the same $35 for a local mom-and-pop store's Drupal site as, say, their site for the winter olympics or urbanvancouver.com?
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Personal home page | Rhombic Networks: Drupal-friendly web hosting
Yes
We do charge the same.
Basically, we say unlimited disk space / bandwidth within reasonable limits, where "reasonable" is defined by us -- i.e. we'll work with people to get them the hosting they need.
We're still working out what "reasonable" is based on customers, customer growth, hardware, traffic, etc.
Trends in shared hosting
My comments were based on where shared hosting is going. Initially disk and bandwidth were the important criteria because shared hosts did not limit CPU and memory. Few people used dynamic sites. Only a few CGI scripts, ...etc.
The landscape is changing now: people use phpBB2, Wordpress, Drupal or other blog/CMS that is fairly easy to install.
This increases the load on shared servers, and hence hosting companies are imposing CPU and memory limits. They may be in the acceptable use policy, or may not be advertised at all.
Read the fine print, and if you do not find it, ask questions. Something like:
This may not be an issue for a low volume single site, but if you have multi sites on, or the crawlers/feeds find their way to you, you will run into issues.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba
CPU
I agree. Unless you have "heavy content", the most important thing for a drupal site is CPU.
Miguel Duarte
Webmaster of: Lisbon Guide & Love Poems