Room to Grow
A lot of people thinking about making serious web sites think about their server solution. The simple shared host is not enough anymore, or won’t be for long, and you need another server.
But what do you get? There’s tons of options out there, which is the best? The truth is the best is always dependent on the company serving you. Looking out for a company’s history is always a good thing to do. Giant companies like 1and1 may look like a scam because they’re so cheap, but their very well furnished data centers ensure your website won’t be lost do a server crash and you’ll always have top up times.
Shared hosting is not somewhere you will talk about redundancy, but since your data is in a shared pot, you kind of expect it to be available on more than one server. After all, you’re not buying a single server, if your server crashes, everybody else on it does. To cope for these issues, bigger companies like 1and1 store your data on multiple servers. However, smaller contenders like DreamHost only store your data on one disk with no redundancy at all. Occasional backups are made, but that’s about it. A server crash on DreamHost can mean the death of your website.
However, bigger companies like 1and1 don’t always have the greatest support. The best they’ll have is often calls that look as if they’ve been routed to India, where some poor non-knowledgeable person is reading the manual for you.
As much as you wished 1and1 would give you better support if you pay more money, take for example a dedicated server, they won’t. Dedicated servers will probably end up with even less support than the shared hosting packages. As long as the hardware works correctly, 1and1 certainly won’t bother helping you in your software fixing as it is very clear in the agreement that it is a self-managed server (if that’s what you bought).
1and1 and other large companies serving millions of users have very interesting server offers. They’re cheaper than competition and just look perfect for that matter. However, if you’re planning on growing, don’t stay too long in the arms of big companies that do not offer complex hosting solutions. Unlike popular beliefs, it is the smaller companies that have more time to tend to users individually that offer these complex hosting solutions.
Web Hosting Buzz and Media Temple are two good examples of these smaller higher quality companies.
Figure it out like this. These companies can give you custom made managed solutions that offer multiple servers with your configuration choice up to the last detail, human to human discussed. Even though that top of line single server box at 1and1 looks pretty interesting for the 400$ per month price tag, it stops there. And often times, two cheap servers, one dedicated to the database and the other to web serving, are more efficient than one big ass machine.
Staying with 1and1 for an unpredictable growth is like having a death wish. You’ll really want to shoot yourself when you realize that you can’t have more than one server for the same site with 1and1.
If you’re planning on making a web site that’ll grow, you’ll need much more than a single server to scale. This is why going with companies like Web Hosting Buzz that offer complex hosting solutions is a good idea. You can start small, with shared hosting, and grow with them as you grow.
Better Tools are Better than Efficient
The statement “Rails doesn’t scale” is very controversial. It has been proven that Rails is slower than most tools out there. Yes, PHP scales better. But again, this very last statement is controversial.
The truth is, PHP solutions will be faster than Ruby on Rails. The other truth is, scaling PHP is not a game of fun. However slower Rails may be, it’s still a much prettier way to do web developement that’ll make your developers smile. More importantly, it’ll require less people to do the same thing.
So, let’s say PHP is twice as fast. Where your 500$ server will be enough for PHP, you’ll have to put in 500$ more per month for a Rails equivalent. That’s 12’000$ per year vs 6’000$.
However, PHP requires more people, so let’s say you have to hire another programmer that costs you 60’000$ per year instead of doubling your server. That’s 10 times the additional cost for scaling.
Servers are always getting cheaper, workforce on the other hand isn’t. So instead of thinking of code performance, you should simply go with which one is cooler to work with. The same goes for operating systems. If you think your IT will be happier with a certain OS, go with it instead of going with the more performant.
* Of course, just keep a bit of logic in there. For example, don’t host your site on a platform with poorer security because it’s easier to work with.
** The numbers are 100% fictive and are not based on reality. If you want to know what’s the real difference between Rails and a PHP framework, do your research.
