Some Pre-Sales Stuff... Strangely enough

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Hello there

We are starting a fledgling web design business, prompted by more than a few requests for web sites over the last few weeks. Currently, we host everything with a certain provider that claims to "host your dreams" and have done so for our own sites for the last 4 years.

However, my dreams don't consist of multiple email and site failures and security breaches, so I want to move to a better service before my renewal is up in March.

After a bit of due diligence, KH has some very good feedback from looking around the net, not to mention a small raft of very tempting deals.

However....

I am concerned about some of the things I am reading in the support areas of this forum about Wordpress sites being slow and sluggish, despite the suggestions of the reportedly excellent KH support. Since we foresee most of the work we will get as being centred around the WP CMS framework, this is a real problem if our sites will be the subject of crappy performance.

And since I want to ensure we don't oversell our hosting on whatever server we eventually buy, I'm kind of taken aback by these reports. At the moment, I don't foresee any considerably large amounts of traffic for our clients, but I want to plan to be successful for our business specific projects and not see our sites killed by stuff like "the digg effect" etc, never mind WP sluggishness issues.

So I'm really looking at two things here...

What can you say/do in order to put my mind to rest regarding the WP issues reported by other users on what appears to be an otherwise excellent hosting provider?

And...

Assuming relatively basic WP installations and about 5k page views a month, running on a CPanel based VPS or equivalent, how many customer site installations do you suggest could be fit on one of the base packages without turning the response and transmission speed to crap? (This question of course is ignoring the previous one atm...)

Make that three things...

Thinking about it, what happens when a site hosted with you becomes stupidly popular? I'm totally ok with paying for bandwidth overages and extra server provision, but I just want to know that, assuming the server and applications within it are configured and maintained correctly, nothing short of global thermonuclear war will knock the site out.

Thanking you kindly

Trefor
 
Unregistered said:
Hello there

We are starting a fledgling web design business, prompted by more than a few requests for web sites over the last few weeks. Currently, we host everything with a certain provider that claims to "host your dreams" and have done so for our own sites for the last 4 years.

However, my dreams don't consist of multiple email and site failures and security breaches, so I want to move to a better service before my renewal is up in March.

After a bit of due diligence, KH has some very good feedback from looking around the net, not to mention a small raft of very tempting deals.

However....

I am concerned about some of the things I am reading in the support areas of this forum about Wordpress sites being slow and sluggish, despite the suggestions of the reportedly excellent KH support. Since we foresee most of the work we will get as being centred around the WP CMS framework, this is a real problem if our sites will be the subject of crappy performance.

And since I want to ensure we don't oversell our hosting on whatever server we eventually buy, I'm kind of taken aback by these reports. At the moment, I don't foresee any considerably large amounts of traffic for our clients, but I want to plan to be successful for our business specific projects and not see our sites killed by stuff like "the digg effect" etc, never mind WP sluggishness issues.

So I'm really looking at two things here...

What can you say/do in order to put my mind to rest regarding the WP issues reported by other users on what appears to be an otherwise excellent hosting provider?

And...

Assuming relatively basic WP installations and about 5k page views a month, running on a CPanel based VPS or equivalent, how many customer site installations do you suggest could be fit on one of the base packages without turning the response and transmission speed to crap? (This question of course is ignoring the previous one atm...)

Make that three things...

Thinking about it, what happens when a site hosted with you becomes stupidly popular? I'm totally ok with paying for bandwidth overages and extra server provision, but I just want to know that, assuming the server and applications within it are configured and maintained correctly, nothing short of global thermonuclear war will knock the site out.

Thanking you kindly

Trefor
Click to expand...

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in KnownHost and the background information. We do have many clients running WP blogs and many are just fine. The slowness that really occurs is for the ones who have plugins installed as some plugins are terribly designed and would be better off non-existent. Others just need more RAM as traffic increases of course. I wouldn't be able to say your sites would work without any issues on one of our VPS's as the true test is when the sites are live on our servers. We do our best to assist identifying whatever issue may be present as that's what we're here for. We don't waste time and will tell you our findings if it's good or bad. The nice thing with a VPS and Hybrid is you can upgrade from one to the other with a simple reboot so this helps you find the ideal VPS/Hybrid. Some customers have 1 WP blog on our VS5 and that's it since it's very busy with lots of traffic/pageviews. Others have 50-100 WP blogs on our VS3 plan with no issues. So it varies per customer on what they can do on their VPS/Hybrid. Putting a number to it would be a guess at best since it varies so much amongst customers based on their needs/requirements.

Based on what you've said we'd say the VS3 would be a good starting point as it includes a large amount of RAM for $50 along with plenty of bandwidth. If you find the VS3 is more then enough you can even downgrade to the VS2 plan.

Another thing to add is if you order cPanel with us and use it now we can manage the migration for you as well so that's one less thing for you to do. Hope this helps. Anything else you need let us know.

Thanks,
Joel
 
A very lucid and clear answer - thank you.

One thing I feel I must double check though, because it has made me do a double take.

Assuming we take the CPanel options (and we were planning on it), you are telling me that KnownHost will manage the whole migration of all our existing sites, domains, email, databases etc from Dreamhost over to you, because they are actually running CPanel also?

I'm always a little anxious ever email migrations, but if that is correct, I am laughing my ass off; that would take a serious amount of work away from us and allow us to concentrate on other issues.

Very interested to know your answer here. DH kinda push the fact that their panel is their own and would be funny to know that it isn't really.

And while we're at it, what do you do in terms of email migration etc? It is my intention to inform all clients well in advance that there may be an outage as the MX records propagate etc and that they should contact all their clients also, but if I can remember how to do it, I would like to ensure that no mail goes missing for them.

Thanks

Trefor
 
Trefor,

Thanks for the reply and sorry for the delay. I thought I replied and it turns out I never did. I am very sorry. If you use cPanel (www.cpanel.net) control panel and you order it from us then yes we will migrate all the data. Unless Dreamhost changed things recently they use their own custom control panel. We've helped customers move to us from them but it's not automated and you do have manual work unfortunately. We will restore backups of the databases per request but you'd need to FTP the files over (not complicated usually). Emails wouldn't come over though in this scenario. One way to speed up DNS propagation is to have your current host change your TTL settings so it will resolve to us (new host) quicker. Anything else needed let me know. Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Joel
 
Joel

Thanks very much for this. I'll start making the preparations on our end. It's unfortunate that it isn't a fully automated migration (I *was* getting excited there for a moment), but I can live with that. =)

Thanks again

Trefor
 
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