Ask Slashdot: What Should a Non-Profit Look For In a Web Host?

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."

Comments

Managed VPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like maybe you want a managed VPS with cloud-like flexibility. Something like VPS.net or HostGator, maybe? Or you might want to get a part-time IT guy on board so you've got someone who can handle this stuff without the guesswork or asking the unwashed hordes of /.

Re:Managed VPS?

[Cenan]

This.
If you're here for help on this, you're doing it wrong. Get someone on board that can take you through these decisions (because there are going to be more involved than just this), someone who can do the groundwork analysis for you.

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

That is vague at best, and certainly not enough basis to make an informed decision on, or recommendation. Do yourself a huge favor and just hire someone for it, the 90s were the time for nephew art, not so much nowadays.

wow, that's not exactly specific

[roman_mir]

A large, multi-national non-profit org. that hosts content that is looked at by 1000 people at any one time, and that's all the info basically. Nothing about your current usage pattern, nothing about your site, is it dynamic, static, what is it running, what does it do?

I suggest you find somebody to look and evaluate your needs, given that you call yourself 'the most geeky of the group', I think I can figure out that you are running almost no dynamic content (dynamic in the sense that there is an application behind your site), so it must be mostly static stuff that somebody updates by hand (probably), or am I wrong? Can't really be sure from the summary. So giving an advice from your summary is basically impossible, you should get somebody to evaluate what you have, what you actually need, then, when you have that information you can ask more questions on /. and people can actually give you a meaningful advice maybe then.

How much time can you invest?

[Guspaz]

And what's your budget? You can throw some money at Linode to get a managed VPS, and that'll scale up or down very easily, so long as your needs don't exceed what you can do with a single node (it's not hard to throw more RAM and CPU at a problem, but if you need to scale to multiple boxes, that's more complicated). If you have more time than money, you can do the same thing yourself and just spend a few hours a month keeping things up to date and maintained. $140-180 per month is probably going to cover you, or $40-80 if you DIY.

If you really want to have this as close to zero-effort as possible, throw some money at somebody like rackspace who does cloud hosting, where your site is sitting on top of their cloud so they're already handling scaling stuff for you, and you never have to worry even a little about the infrastructure. They start at $150/mth and go up from there, so they'd probably end up more expensive than a managed VPS, but at that point they're doing pretty much everything for you, including scaling to multiple servers transparently.

Utilities Don't Care

[bill_mcgonigle]

I know I'm overgeneralizing, but in large part commodity utility providers, like web hosting companies, don't really care about specific customer problems. They will work diligently to make sure that if they sell a widget, that widget is working the way they say it will, but if you're wondering what your capacity planning outlook should be, where the system inefficiencies are, how you could tune the site to make it perform better - hire a local consultant who will learn about your company, your customers, and your systems. The web hosting companies do care about their problems, just not yours.

Find a consult who's not reselling anything and then if it turns out that the current web hosting company is, or ever becomes, the problem, then he will tell you straight and help you find a better solution. I do this in Northern New England, but you'll find somebody just about everywhere (go by word of mouth from your peers).

Re:Can't fix what?

[Mr. Theorem]

Close, I think you're thinking of 501(c)(3), which is the part of the Internal Revenue Code that spells out the tax exemption rules for charitable non-profits.