Need an Alternative to Rackspace for Hosting Koimoi.com

Two and a half months back I had an interesting bet with Alok 'Rodinhood' Kejriwal to double the web traffic of koimoi.com. The traffic has been quite steady ever since and I hope to win the bet real soon.

However, the problem with increased traffic is hosting. Right now, Koimoi is running on instances from Rackspace but we have occasional downtime. The problem is quite acute as we enjoy quite some reputation as a Bollywood Portal. Even a small downtime is pretty bad for our reputation, not to mention the traffic we lose.

Now I know Rackspace is a famous name in Hosting Solutions but they have failed to impress me so far. Seems they are themselves confused as to the reason behind their downtime. They tell my system administrator it's coz of a DDOS attack and in 2 minutes contradict their own statement saying it's coz of excessive load. And it just keeps getting better. The latest is an error in their load balancer twice in the interval of less than an hour.

We have already doubled the Rackspace instances and RAM owing to a surge in traffic last week. However, there has been no difference and we are still getting downtimes quite often.

I understand if it's once in a while but it really becomes irritating when I keep hearing the same stuff every week. The best part (thankfully): The downtime usually happens not when the traffic is at its peak which rules out the excessive load excuse of Rackspace.

Has any one here faced a similar issue before? If yes did you find a solution to the same. If no can anyone recommend a better hosting solution which can scale upto 100,000 visitors a day?

I really got to win this one.

Tags: Hosting, Koimoi.com, Solutions

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We use Amazon Web Services and we have our own monitoring system. As of now the uptime is like 99.9%. No doubt we don't have a large amount of traffic but if I think that, too, can be managed. 

I would recommend you use Amazon Web Services EC2 along with Beanstalk. 

If major traffic comes from india try netmagic or ctrl-s..

Yup. Major traffic is from India. Was thinking about netmagic.

Go for Amazon , 

How's the support? 

If, you aren't the biggest fan of cloud hosting than go for a dedicated server solution. With 100k visits per day it can be handled from one server if you have more of static content or go for three servers to balance your load.

Load can be balanced through your front end software, DNS or through dedicated load balancing devices.

If you have a high computing on database than create a MASTER -to- MASTER replication on three servers and link your local image of front end with local database. It will decrease your load to 30k per server with auto-failover (DNS tweaking required).

The problem is it's not coz of the Load. As I already stated in my post the downtime is not when the traffic is at its peak. Thanks for the suggestion though. Will look into dedicated servers.

Again the same thing I would recommend is Amazon but fatcow and godaddy also u can consider but before making any move just let them know that you'll have 1,00,000 "UNIQUE" visitors' traffic per day.

We have been using Rackspace since 5+ years... we have never experienced unscheduled downtime because of hardware. Please speak to your account manager @ Rackspace. Its hard to believe Rackspace does not have the solution for your problem.

Netmagic is a good option, but the only thing is that they don't lease out hardware, hence upgrades are really expensive

Rather then looking at a new host, figure out if you can optimize your code... most of the times servers are not able to handle the load coz of badly written code...

once you have done that, figure out what kinda of pages people are browsing and basis of that take a call on what time hosting you will need..

I agree with Kunal, most of the times the problem is with the application and not the hardware.

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