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.
Kaushal Bhavsar
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.
Anurag Rastogi
I would recommend you use Amazon Web Services EC2 along with Beanstalk.
Vishal Gupta
If major traffic comes from india try netmagic or ctrl-s..
saurav verma
Go for Amazon ,
Tushar Bhargava
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).
Mukul Kumar Sharma
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.
Mukul Kumar Sharma
How’s the support?
Mukul Kumar Sharma
Yup. Major traffic is from India. Was thinking about netmagic.
Kandarp Devashrayee
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.
Ajay Poddar
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
Kunal Sheth
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..
Ajay Poddar
I agree with Kunal, most of the times the problem is with the application and not the hardware.
Mukul Kumar Sharma
Thanks Kunal. Will ask my tech team to look into it.
Ashutosh Kumar
I think if you can include caching at application level, and also at webserver level, and load-balancer. You can get a good deal at AWS. Since you are getting connectivity issues at non-peak times, try getting a snapshot of pings from 3-4 continents as well memory profiling during those periods. I suspect that rackspace has issues with BGP layers, if memory usage doesnt show any spikes.
Jack John
I think instead of cloud hosting you should go with dedicated server concentrating on location the traffic generated from or if target traffic is global you can buy small dedicated server sync the dedi’s best so that result would be better from any location many problem of cloud is if one chain breaks latency take a big hit
Bhavesh Goswami
Mukul, this is the classical limitation of traditional hardware, and the only way to go from here will be cloud… You can get a machine from Amazon Web Service (AWS), from a service called EC2. The machines are damn cheap, and its not that hard to migrate. My friend who owns an ecommerce site had similar issues and now after moving to AWS he can really see a great performance boost, and not that much more cost… Also, this gives you the ability to seemlessly scale up your application as demand rises again.. With Autoscaling feature, you can setup your application so that it scales up automatically when load is high, and scales back down when load is low (to save costs)… I think cloud is the ONLY way 🙂
Akshay Shah
Indian traffic will be better managed with an Indian Datacenter but my experience with godaddy over the past 10 years has been good, I have never seen a major outage till date. Not even with my mails per say. Yes, we do not have such a loadful of traffic but just sharing my experiences.
Akshay Shah
http://www.iwebtechno.com
Sree Kanth
Hi Mukul, How are you doing?
Are you still with koimoi? We are having issues with traffic generation for similar portal like koimoi but it is based out of hyderabad and we cover telugu film industry related news and reviews.
Any suggestions for us to improve the traffic and all. I can share the url via DM/Email.