Topic: I think I'm in trouble - hosting related question? (Page 1 of 1)

I landed a freelance project lately and have hosted it on a shared host. Its still in development for now - the project is a kind of mini portal in the sense that its an official website of a club that has about a thousand members and each member would have a login. There is an admin panel where the admin can upload pdfs for downloading, add news and event updates and add articles. There isn't much uploading here though except for pictures which I would be scaling down using the GD library. However someone told me that hosting it on a shared host was a bad idea and in the long run it would be too slow and hectic.

I've taken a one year contract for hosting this website from teh client and need to meet up with him to discuss other logistics. At the time we finalized the deal and took payments I wasn't aware of this little issue and considering getting a dedicated host for the client is a bit outta budget on mine and the clients end.

I'm worried now on how should I break this to the client so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to mooch out extra cash or am I all worried for nothing here. What should have been the right thing to do like - I was thinking on getting some simple websites and add em like addon domains like how everyones doing - I landed a bit of a complex project as my first one and don't want to blow this one at all man.

I don't think shared hosting will be a problem for a site of this scale but if you want to be careful then you just need to host your big files and galleries on another host. Preferably someplace that is good for hosting big files. Make it invisible to the user with routing if possible. This way if there's a big spike in traffic the files host may get slow but the main site will still be operating at acceptable levels.

Nah I don't think there would be any big files - as I have set it so that all uploaded images are scaled down to just 300 pixel width - on an average of I guess 20k size for images and set a maximum file upload limit of 3 MB. But the think is that what are the pitfalls of a shared host - I mean I never thought about this prior to starting out though...or am I getting all too freaked out for nothing? Note that there are a few hundred members - and they would just be posting articles and comments. No uploading on members parts though - however just downloading I guess...

Always keep your own backups. Files and database. Find a tool that can make incremental and full backups of ftp files and mysql db. If you're really paranoid then make incremental backups every day and full backups every week. This basically means that even if something happens you can quickly restore the whole thing on another host.

Catastrophic failures are really rare tho. The most usual problem that you may face is slowness but it's easy to test and something of this scale usually isn't a problem.

This very site has been on Dreamhost (shared hosting) for years and it probably gets more traffic than your site ever will.

WOW! I never actually even imagined that! Is the asylum still hosted on a shared host? I guess I'm being a bit too paranoid here then in that case. I did ask a buddy in teh business and he advised me that never to get into buying a dedicated host or selling host space as its a headache enough to make sure your websites working without having to be on your wits end to make sure your host doesn't go down.

The issue really is the clients have no idea of what a webhost is or not the only interface they have is well me - so if anything does go wrong its me who would get blamed