200,000 daily impressions. I need hosting advice!

[silverion]

Hello,

I own a 200,000 impressions a day proxy website using 4.5gb of bandwidth daily. I am currently hosting it on a reseller account. My hosting package is getting to its limit and although I could just upgrade the limits, I am more interested in moving it to a VPS or a dedicated server, since I will soon be starting a marketing campaign and am expecting the traffic to triple at the least, after a couple of months. However, I have no idea what hosting specifications should I look for in order for my site to run smoothly for my visitors and load quickly their pages. Could anyone advice me on what server specifications should I look for, to host between 300gb and 1 terabyte of monthly bandwidth usage while keeping the site as fast as possible?

P.S. If you are going to recommend me a specific host or package, unless it is really professional please abstain from it.

P.S.S. Contrary to most proxies, my site does require using MySQL (between 10-50gb of space), so could you also consider this factor in your recommendation.

[Swank]

10-50gb of MySQL space is insane, are you sure its gb and not kb?

Before I can give a specific server you should be looking at, I need to know a few things:

1) How much visitors are you getting a day?
2) If you are indeed using 10-50gb of space in MySQL, you must consider getting a 10,000rpm raptor and above to ensure your pages get served faster than a normal HDD.
3) Check with your current hosting provider on how much RAM and CPU resources your proxy is curently using.

After which I will let you know what kind of server you should be getting.

[darkeden]

wow wish i knew how to get 200k impressions. and 10-50gb of mysql space i think you mean mb. most host's charge insane amounts of money for 50gb

[Entrio]

if that the kind of stuff u have now and ure using a shared hosting, something is not right or oure not saying. If you run a proxy that has 200kimressions on it,thats 5k people with 40 pages per person, ur shared hosting should be suspended. vps would have difficulties with that kind of load ure most definitely want to go with dedicated.

[proxies2u]

where do you get those numbers? I have ~45K proxified page views and use more bandwidth and I limit the max filesize.

I guess your cpunt is about how often you proxy script is accessed, since everything is processed with your script alle of them are counted as pageviews...

if you have real page views start with a bigger VPS (1gb real ram)

[Kershaad]

Originally Posted by darkeden

wow wish i knew how to get 200k impressions.

I inadvertantly found out how to get 1,000,000 impressions in about 2 hours. As amusing as it was, it killed my server. Also killed my eCPM rates as it was all iranian traffic. Got me into the top 10,000 sites in iran over night which was pretty cool.

As soon as I disabled hotlinking (yeah. woops) things went back to normal, my server load plumited, and I was actually making more money because there was a better amount of US traffic that could get there without the middle-east swarm. lol.

If you are getting 200k impressions, you should be making enough that dedicated hosting won't be a problem. If you're noticing that even that number of impressions is making next to nothing, look at where it is comming from. Disable hotlinking, make sure you're using a robots file. I also set up a seperate proxy site just for my iranian/russian traffic. It keeps the US/AU/UK ratios on other sites up so they earn more, and allows me to still serve middle eastern traffic.

Just remember to place some serious restrictions (and serious advertising) on the site dedicated to iranian traffic, because it isn't worth much, so you need to maximise as much as you can.