I need some sever / host advice

[Mutt]

I'd really like some server / host advice. I'm upgrading my vb3.8 apache site to xenforo & while I'm at it i'm thinking I should change hosts too. I'm unhappy w/ how my site ****s the bed around midnight each night when we bump over 1000 users online. considering I have a web server, DB server, & a slave server i expected more. don't know if it's what the host has recommended or my scripts or my DB size but I want a fresh start. right now I average around 9 million page views / month but if we were runnin smooth & not crashing / slowing to a crawl who knows what it really would be. i'm tired of not being able to get on my own site.

is there a place here on xenforo forums that lists recommended sever specs? I need to figure out what to buy (rent I mean) & where to go. I'll be running xenforo, the sphinx search addon sounds cool, and i'm interested in nginx but I have no experience w/ any of it.

it's been years since I've shopped for a host / server & considering how bad my site runs now, I don't trust myself figuring it out. I need some expert advice. I want this thing done right.

thanks in advance.

-----------------

on a side note, i have 20 million posts & most are old crap. we see a tremendous amount of search engine traffic & worry that pruning all that old garbage will cause us to lose a lot of that traffic. anyone have an opinion on how to handle that? I have over 200k members but most are dead / abandoned. I'll prune those before the move.

------------------

While looking here for sever / host information I found this post pointing out some top hosts.

Out of 515 English speaking forums in the top 50,000 sites on the internet; this is what hosts I have noticed the most.
thePlanet
Rackspace
Softlayer
Liquidweb

and this interesting post recommending the nginx over apache

We have hosted our site on Liquidweb VPS for the past few years and have moved to Rackspace Cloudserver a week ago. Much more room to grow now and the move away from Apache to nginx has made a noticeable speed improvement.

 

[Shamil]

and this interesting post recommending the nginx OS

Nginx is not an Operating Systems, but rather a web server software, much like Apache, LiteSpeed and Lighttpd.

 

[Mutt]

thanks, i knew that but mispoke. up until now i've always used apache but because of Andy's post, I'm reading about nginx right now.

 

[Shamil]

thanks, i knew that but mispoke. up until now i've always used apache but because of Andy's post, I'm reading about nginx right now.

nginx is good, for a free web server. On our optimised VPS options, we offer LiteSpeed Web Server, since we've found better performance, especially in our configuration: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entr...aching-Apache-Varnish-versus-Litespeed-Cache/

 

[Luke F]

Grab a nice linux VPS and stick nginx+php-fpm on it. With some basic config optimisations which you can probably find via googling/reading the nginx wiki, you will be amazed at the performance.

It's also an absolute joy to configure - the config files are actually structured and logical (and surprisingly powerful) rather than the confusing mess of Apache.

 

[SneakyDave]

I wish there was an easy way to install php-fpm without compiling it into the PHP core. I think the newest release of PHP includes fpm support, but I don't trust any of the repositories that are providing it on the CentOS stack.

 

[Luke F]

I wish there was an easy way to install php-fpm without compiling it into the PHP core. I think the newest release of PHP includes fpm support, but I don't trust any of the repositories that are providing it on the CentOS stack.

Compiling PHP isn't hard at all.

Download+extract the source, yum-builddep php, copy and run the configure line from phpinfo() with --enable-fpm added, make && make install

 

[SneakyDave]

I've done it in the past, but it always seems to screw up future repository updates for some reason, maybe I'm not using the builddep correctly, but thanks for the tip

 

[maidos]

a note theplanet doesnt exist anymore. The investment group that owns theplanet bought up softlayer and they decided that the softlayer management should take over the entire operation from the planet. So the investment group decided to fire alot of theplanet employees. Funny considering softlayer management wasthe original ppl who started the planet in the first place, they left theplanet and started softlayer as theplanet got bought up.
Softlayer has good reputation however they are known to be overpriced company. Also they have terminated one client called simplecdn just because they complained about high network spikes. That alone made that decision to terminate hundred of servers from simplecdn. They are in pending lawsuit.
I would recommend singlehop.com

 

[Luke F]

I take it you're uninstalling the existing php package via yum beforehand?

 

[SneakyDave]

I take it you're uninstalling the existing php package via yum beforehand?

Yes, that's the recommended practice isn't it?

 

[Luke F]

Yes, that's the recommended practice isn't it?

Yeah just checking

 

[Mutt]

I heard from salty & want to say thanks. maybe that will work out.