Today, 01:45 PM Hello all, thanks for taking the time to read this thread.
I work for a division of a large corporation and we are about to begin a major website overhaul, and I would appreciate some input on what type of hosting you think would be best suited to us.
Currently we get a little less than 1,000 page views per day and about 7,500 visits per month. Our site is used primarily for downloading product information in .pdf format.
However, on the new site we'll be adding some features like a secured portal where customers can login and retrieve their specific pricing and discount information. This will require a db to contain about 4,000 customers and their corresponding discounts on a dozen or so item groups, in addition to about 20 fields worth of info on about 8,000 items.
We'd also like to generate video and other dynamic content.
This project will be largely outsourced to a group of freelancers (to keep costs down):
- a project manager to oversee the project
- a user experience team (of internal folks)
- a graphics/visuals person
- a tech guy (to manage the db and interface with our enterprise system)
We won't use the mailservers - that will stay on our corporate system.
What's important to us is cost and uptime. I am assuming our tech guy can do some basic server admin, so I was leaning toward an unmanaged server and then spending the difference on the freelancer.
I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.
Mark
Today, 02:13 PM Mark, From our experiences the key differentiator in utilising a cloud-based system in comparison to dedicated hardware comes down to a few key points which you would address during your recommendation / specification phase -
1. Speed (not latency) - how fast the data / information needs to be fed out to the end-user (customer) - normally, from our experience, and comparing 15k SAS based dedicated hardware, we've found cloud-based deployments to lag in that respect.
2. Redundancy - cloud based deployments will have a level of redundancy built-in - this depends on what the underlying platform is ofcourse - looking at what's out there in the market, you would at the very least have redundant & scaleable storage, which effectively would mean you can add storage on a required basis as your provision grows. In terms of cost a cloud deployment will definitely cost more than dedicated hardware.
3. CDN - some cloud systems will allow you to easily progress or complement your application with CDN delivery (depends if you require / need something like that or not) .. I'm sure your video delivery would benefit from this, however, again, this depends on your customer / user base location in comparison to the host.
4. Uptime - cloud-based systems will give you (on paper) a higher uptime, but again, dedicated hardware gives similar, if not better, uptimes too .. so, this can be long-winded argument ... however, ANY deployment which is "well serviced", will give you good uptime ... it depends on your maintenance policy in terms of hardware upgrades, etc.
Hope that helps ... 
Hello all, thanks for taking the time to read this thread. I work for a division of a large corporation and we are about to begin a major website overhaul, and I would appreciate some input on what type of hosting you think would be best suited to us.
Currently we get a little less than 1,000 page views per day and about 7,500 visits per month. Our site is used primarily for downloading product information in .pdf format.
However, on the new site we'll be adding some features like a secured portal where customers can login and retrieve their specific pricing and discount information. This will require a db to contain about 4,000 customers and their corresponding discounts on a dozen or so item groups, in addition to about 20 fields worth of info on about 8,000 items.
We'd also like to generate video and other dynamic content.
This project will be largely outsourced to a group of freelancers (to keep costs down):
- a project manager to oversee the project
- a user experience team (of internal folks)
- a graphics/visuals person
- a tech guy (to manage the db and interface with our enterprise system)
We won't use the mailservers - that will stay on our corporate system.
What's important to us is cost and uptime. I am assuming our tech guy can do some basic server admin, so I was leaning toward an unmanaged server and then spending the difference on the freelancer.
I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.
Mark
Today, 02:45 PM 
Your numbers make this project fit even with shared hosting. But if you care about control and data privacy a virtual server with warranted resource in a HA environment could be a very good starting point.__________________
Prometeus.com & IperWeb.com Hosting Solutions since 1997
Provider Indipendent IPv4 and ASN 34971 (RIPE) Multiple gigabit/s network capacity
Express WordPress and Drupal Hosting
Today, 05:31 PM Thanks for the replies! Iperweb, what is an HA environment? Data security is definitely important to me, which is why I had kind of ruled out a shared environment (other than VPS).
Intellitech, thanks for all the info. I am a bit confused by your comment that cloud would be more expensive than dedicated. Looking at 1and1, Softlayer, Liquid, etc, their cloud seems to be less expensive than an equivalent dedicated server.
What's the difference between cloud and VPS?
Thanks again,
Mark
Today, 05:37 PM Mark, HA=High Availability. To make virtual servers high available you need to run them on clusters connected to a storage area network (SAN) so that you can migrate the virtual machine from a node to another in case of planned maintenance on each node of the cluster or have the virtual machine restarted on another node in case of hardware failure of a node.
__________________
Prometeus.com & IperWeb.com Hosting Solutions since 1997
Provider Indipendent IPv4 and ASN 34971 (RIPE) Multiple gigabit/s network capacity
Express WordPress and Drupal Hosting
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