Steve Power wrote:
If you're servicing all the schools in kent, then maybe the figures are real.
I'm not really. I don't know how many schools we have in Kent. For all I know, it could just be this one school. For one school, I would expect at *MOST* 100 simultaneous users, but more likely 30 (one classroom).
How many HTTP connections would 30 kids using a website generate? I have no real sense of proportion here...
But tbh, you're barking up the wrong tree. Dont take this the wrong way, but you need to run this like a popular e-commerce site, not a hobby site.
We would not have moved to UH if we saw this as a hobby site. In any case, I do expect to scale up the service as our needs increase. I just would like to have a better understanding of what our needs actually are (e.g. is 500 connections reasonable?).
If you have thousands of users then shared hosting is no longer appropriate and just wont scale as their business model relies on lots of inactive websites.
I think we have about 2,000 users on the Drupal site or so. The large majority are inactive. Would you guess that kind of site merits a dedicated server?
As I've said earlier, UH does not over-sell their resources (e.g. disk space and bandwidth). So the comment about their business model, while not wrong, is less true for this particular host than you might think.
Even if you could move hosts, its not really going help however you configure Drupal as the problem seems to be at an edge traffic shaping device. Thats only my opinion tho.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Daniel.