[consulting] Sluggishness Concern

[Nancy Wichmann]

Please excuse my blonde-ness here.  Several responders have written:

> "guaranteed uptime"
There is no such animal.  The best you can get is a host that penalizes
itself for excessive downtime. Those companies may take extra steps to avoid
those penalties, but cannot actually guarantee the up-time.

> "On shared hosts, sites are competing for limited resources..."
> "...recommend getting a VPS with dedicated resources..."
On both of these solutions, you will be competing for resources.

On a VPS, you get a "guaranteed" piece of the box; on a shared one, the
competition is more dynamic.  So, if I'm on a box with a 2.4 GHz processor
that is split into 4 VPS's, I will only get a 0.6 GHz (600 MHz) processor
slice.  But that same box on a shared host would give me the full 2.4 GHz,
as long as it's my turn. Yes, this game gets more fun with multiple
processors, but the concept is the same.

The real difference is that the VPS does some governance where most shared
hosts do little or none.  And VPS boxes are more limited in how many slices
(not sites) run on them. I have been on a host that did absolutely nothing
to protect me, and my sites suffered. My current host (a Drupal-optimized
host) must do something because my live sites are almost always faster than
my local PC - and it is shared hosting and multi-site.  Granted, my sites
are not super high volume.

I have done work for customers using VPS, and I was unimpressed.

So I have to tell people YMMV - do your homework. If you can, start with a
shared host and be prepared to move up. Why jump right into higher costs if
they are unnecessary?

So go ahead, start the flames.

Nancy
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. - Martin L. King, Jr.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: multipart/alternative
Size: 0 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/attachments/20090305/46aca304/attachment.bin 
-------------- next part --------------

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com 
Version: 8.0.176 / Virus Database: 270.11.8/1984 - Release Date: 3/4/2009 7:17 PM