Hi all,

Does anyone have any recommendations for dedicated hosting in Australia? My site is currently hosted in the US on VPS hosting but I haven't been particularly happy with it. Also, speed is becoming a problem. I am getting about 250,000 pageviews a month and each page is about 1mb total. I'm currently transferring about 100gb per month (is that normal??)

I spoke to Netregistry today and they seem pretty switched-on and are at least aware of Joomla and how to set it up. Has anyone had any experience with them?

Also, is there a way to calculate or get some idea of what hardware configuration I should be going for? 1gb RAM starts at $220/month, 2gb is $380 and 4gb RAM is $680 per month. What's the sweetspot?

Thanks,

Ben

Ben we've just recently gone for hosting outside Australia. Mainly because of bandwidth. That's the killer we've found.

I'd be checking that very closely. The chances are, if you're getting a lot of bandwidth in that quote (we've gone for 1Tb per month as we'll have up to 50 sites on this package), then the hosting is more than likely in the US anyway, despite the shopfront being in Australia.

I'll check out our server specs today and get back to you.

Cost of bandwidth is a lot higher in australia.

Your best bet is to look to see if you can optimize your site, Can you reduce the page size, size of images, number of files, cache files.

If you get multiple page views from the same user can you cache a lot of between views, css, js, html, etc.

Thanks,

So you think I'll get better value optimising the site than moving it local? 80% of my visitors are from Australia (it's an Australian-targeted site).

I haven't been able to run with caching on because I need to rotate banners. I'm using a mambot to insert random banners into content. Is there a way to have the images from the content cached, but still have the banners rotate?

Also, I was assuming that desicated hosting would be better than VPS. Is that a correct assumption?

Thanks again,

Ben

Another question - how much difference will more CPU cores make? With Joomla, how much of the latency is due to processing?

Thanks,

Ben

Sorry to keep talking to myself, but it seems like a significant part of the lag is the server itself.

If I look at the stats on Pingdom I can see that the time between the client connecting and the first byte being sent is longer that the time it takes for the data to actually transmit.

So I guess this points towards site optimization & faster hardware rather than a local server.

bgunsberger wrote:


I am unsure if it is or not, depends on what type of deals you can get



I can think of some technical solutions, how easy for you to implement is an issue I can not help with.

1. cache for say 5 mintues, that way it rotates every 5 minutes
2. move it out of the content in to a module
3. use javascript to rotate the banners/get them via ajax
4. use an iframe to get them



How good a VPS is what else is on the same machine, how many VPS are on there, etc. A dedicated machine just means you have more resources and more control over the other neighbours

Interesting. The banners are running through a module (artbanners). There's no way to call a module via a URL, is there? Alternatively, is there a way to link to a module position by URL?

Thanks,

Ben

does the module have the option of turning off the cache .. so you could possibly turn it on for the site and off for that individual module.

caching, will help speed up things if the issue is CPU usage, but potentionally make it worse if it is lack of HD space/memory.

looking at reducing your page size will increase speed in downloading the site.

have a look at firebug/yslow for looking at the size/number of files your using.

you can look at gzipping the files .. on will reduce file size, off will reduce cpu usage

Hi,



It doesn't. The images get hardcoded into the resulting page and don't change until a page flush. Is that something I can add myself?



The server is a bit sluggish now and I just checked on Pingdom again and the server lag time is definitely more than the transfer time.



I thought that only gzipped the text files. Most of the size of the page comes from images. Do these get gzipped as well?

Thanks,

Ben

also have a look at:
code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Nice plugin. I'll add it to my list.

Our dedicated server is pretty standard with 4Gb ram the only "extra". It's the bandwidth that we got buckets of (the same amount in Australia would've cost squillions - if we could get it at all).

I'd still look at what's on your page. A 1Mb is just too heavy IMHO. Are there some images you can optimise? Can some of them get the flick? For my sites, I have this self-imposed limit of 30kb for any image. I fret if something has to be more than that (sometimes, depending on what it is, it may of course) but even my 600x200 photo rotating header images are <25kb each and they still look good. (Of course, every weekend I'm affectively on dial up, so this may have something to do with my obsession with file size.)

Thanks Sue.


What processor configuration do you have? I checked with my current US host (Lunarpages) and I can get a dedicated 2x2.66 GHz Xeon with 4gb RAM and 2TB bandwidth for $250/month.

Do you mind me asking your provider and if you're happy with them?



It's a failry image-heavy site. I played around with imagemagick to see what I could optimise and couldn't get it down much without sacrificing image quality. Anything less than a 80% quality gives pretty noticeable JPEG artifacts. Are there any other tricks to get filesizes down?

Cheers,

Ben

Ben, we've only had the hosting about three days, so it's still a bit early to tell. That configuration looks very much like ours though.

Re the images. Without seeing them, it's hard to say. Have you got jpgs that should be gifs (and vice versa)? I don't know anything about imagemagick, I'm afraid. I'm a strictly Fireworks only kinda girl but I'm sure the principle is the same.