Hi there, this is more of a request for advice.
I have had over 5 years of experience with running small/medium websites, all of which have been hosted on Shared Hosting (1&1, web-mania, 123-reg etc)
I currently run a medium site on a Business Pro packaged with 1&1. It has 6500 members and gets around 1 million page views a month. Currently the bulk of the site is a forum.
I am planning to expand into creating an Online Fantasy Soccer/Football Game which will mean that the traffic and pageviews will increase significantly.
The game will be database intensive with members changing their teams on a constant basis and the site will get VERY busy on a Friday night and Saturday morning GMT before the weekly deadline comes into play. So reliability is a must!
I am aiming to have 50,000 members by the end of year one, and 250,000 by the end of year two, and my ultimate target is 1million members by the end of year three.
I have a few questions that I would greatly appreciate some advice from the experts.
1. What hosting package should I choose?
I understand that I will need a dedicated server to manage a site of this scale.
I have been recommended the Planet (
http://www.theplanet.com/) and they seem to have good reviews. It seems the choice is whether to have one powerful server to run the whole site, or 2 servers, one for the website and one for the database.
2. Should I use a CMS or a Website Management tool ?
Currently I use Invision Power Board, which is great for my forum, but I have been developing a custom Game in PHP and am unsure how to integrate this game with the forums. The main focus of the site will be the game, and the forums will sit in the background but they will be an important aspect. I currently use teh forum software for user registrations and for managing user details, I would like to manage this on an overall level rather than relying on the forums, so that if I need to upgrade the forums I can e.g. disable them, but the game will still run fine as it is separate.
3. Scalability
My growth plans are optimistic, and with the Game I will only have 2-3 months of the year when the season isn't running to perform major upgrades, so I want scalability to be a key feature of the hosting package. If my site is struggling and becoming overloaded I don't want to have to move servers, I would much prefer to pay for some more CPU, Ram, HDD etc.
I am quite technical, but by no means a hosting or hardware expert as all my experience has been with web-hosting.
It would be great to get your advice.
Thanks
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