Ask Slashdot: What Should a Non-Profit Look For In a Web Host? 100
An anonymous reader writes "We are a large (multi-national) non-profit and currently deal with 503s on a near daily basis. We've worked on this for over a year and the host hasn't been able to figure out how to fix it. We're paying for a managed host and need to evaluate other options. My boss has tasked me with evaluating a new one. I'm the most geeky of the group, so I know the terms, but don't have a sense of what's actually needed to suit our needs. We sometimes have upwards of 1,000 people browsing the site at the same time, so my sense is that we shouldn't need massive amounts of power or bandwidth... but, somehow that's not working on our current host. Can anyone help me get a sense of what types of hosting will best suit the needs of a 'large' non-profit? We're not Facebook, but we're not a mom-and-pop shop. Any help or tips would be fantastic, particularly if you've also selected a new hosting provider in the past year or so. I don't necessarily need actual names (though those would be nice, too) but at least some tips on what makes a huge difference when suddenly a whole bunch of people around the world read an email and want to help out."
You need a CDN (Score:2, Interesting)
With that kind of traffic you could be making considerable savings and have a much faster site if you used a CDN; They'd cache the static parts of your site - the assets, and hopefully a large number of your static pages. They're normally cheaper than the bandwidth your provider provides, and a good one will be faster still.
I recommend the newcomer fastly [fastly.com] for this because they offer a few things that many other places don't (real time stats and the ability to do edge includes so you can cache _almost_ static stuff.) But really any CDN will be better than your normal webhost.
Re:Why is this special? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you're really wrong about this.
My bet would be that a very very tiny percentage of "top execs" for non-profits are "making bank big time". Judging from the many non-profits I deal with, it's more likely that the top execs are making less than the office management. Occasionally you will see well-paid development people, but that's generally a function of how much money they bring in. It's worth paying your development person $100,000 if she's responsible for $5million in annual income.
I run a micro-non-profit myself and the person who does our web development makes infinitely more than I do, which is zero. And I've found that situation is more common than I expected.
People don't usually start (or work for) non-profits in order to "make big bank".
Off-topic, I'm putting this question out to the community: Have you ever met anyone who refers to money as "bank" who is not a douchebag? I'm not saying this is you, icebike, but you should be aware that it is one of the warning signs.
Re:Why is this special? (Score:2, Interesting)
It says a lot considering hes talking 1000 users like they should be able to handle it with no problem. A thousand concurrent users is more than I'd bet 80% of hosting providers can handle and how bad the problem is is going to depend a lot on how CPU/ database heavy the software they are running is. I've seen some software max out perfectly good machines at 256 users. What's worse, the people here who honestly seem to have correct answers are getting drowned out by a ton of idiots who think this will be an easy problem to solve.
The fix will not be to "just get a VPS server" he will need several, along with a way to keep them in sync and a means of load balancing them. Otherwise he could go with an "old fashioned" web server cluster. My worry is that the guy won't even have a way to figure out what posts know what they are talking about.