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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."
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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 $150/mth and go up from there, so they'd probably end up more expensive than a managed VPS, but at that point they're doing pretty much everything for you, including scaling to multiple servers transparently.
Asking for "a hosting provider" is not enough context: what are the technical details - languages / OS / DB / expected load, etc?
Have you done any troubleshooting on why are you getting 503s - are there not enough app server processes / threads? Is your DB blocking things?
1000 simultaneous users isn't much, so unless you're on a thoroughly undersized VPS (or worse, an oversubscribed *shared* host) you should first look at WHY things aren't working. Changing hosting providers won't help if your app is doing stoopid things (loading the entire DB in memory on every request, etc) but it will take a lot of cash and time.
I know I'm overgeneralizing, but in large part commodity utility providers, like web hosting companies, don't really care about specific customer problems. They will work diligently to make sure that if they sell a widget, that widget is working the way they say it will, but if you're wondering what your capacity planning outlook should be, where the system inefficiencies are, how you could tune the site to make it perform better - hire a local consultant who will learn about your company, your customers, and your systems. The web hosting companies do care about their problems, just not yours.
Find a consult who's not reselling anything and then if it turns out that the current web hosting company is, or ever becomes, the problem, then he will tell you straight and help you find a better solution. I do this in Northern New England, but you'll find somebody just about everywhere (go by word of mouth from your peers).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Have you considered that it might be your application crashing or freezing up that is causing the 503 errors? You'd better rule out that possibility before you look elsewhere, because if your company's lousy code is to blame then you'll likely have the same problems wherever you go.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
... whatever
It says something about the guy asking the question: i.e. he's not someone who first tries to pass himself off as a professional to a company and who then turns around and asks /.ers to do his job for him. Rather, he's likely someone who does not do this for a living, who specializes in something else, but is just the guy who got stuck with the website problem. The margins are often too tight for non-profits to bring in specialists. Plus, hiring a web guy would be likely be a deductible expense for most businesses, but not so for a non-profit. We might conclude, therefore, that he's looking for a solution that is as low maintenance as possible. Perhaps that's the significance of this being a non-profit.
As others have pointed out, you've missed a few details. So, you're getting 503's -- do you know why? Is processor or disk load too high? Is your server misconfigured? I'm guessing at this point that your host is managed by a third party -- have you asked them to explain the problems you're having? Have they offered a solution (even if it might cost you more money)?
:)
What is your budget? What are you currently paying? What about your level of in-house experience? If you're a linux / unix admin (or have one at your disposal) you might be best served by using either a managed VPS or colocated server (or a couple, behind a load balancer, but that gets to be more expensive and complicated to set up).
If you're less willing or able to manage hosting yourself, be aware that generally, you'll get better service from managed hosting providers if you're willing to spend money. Even though you're a non-profit, probably with a limited budget, you shouldn't skimp on hosting if you decide that a managed host is right for you. If you typically have ~1000 active users on your site, any downtime will hurt you -- even if it doesn't cost you in terms of donations, it will make you seem less legitimate.
Anyway, here are your options:
Unmanaged VPS -- cheapest option, will require some technical expertise on your end. Potentially less reliable than colocated servers.
Colocation -- Can be expensive, requires a fair amount of technical expertise. If configured properly, your site should be very, very reliable, but there's a lot of room for error.
Managed hosting -- Forget about paying $80/year for managed hosting, considering the amount of traffic you're getting. You may have to spend $100/month or more. Good managed hosting won't require much experience from you or your staff, and will be less expensive (probably) than colocating multiple servers. Do research, read reviews, etc. to find a provider you feel comfortable with. While price is an important consideration, you shouldn't go with the cheapest option just because it's the cheapest. If you need to talk to a technician at 3am, you want to be sure that you're going to get someone on the phone when you call. It's also probably important that the person you get when you call during an outage / emergency isn't an idiot, and with most bargain-basement hosts, you're lucky to get a human on the phone at all.
Good luck
Facts have a liberal bias.
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.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Based on my experience via my wife's work in the state affiliate of a national non-profit, I feel the OP's pain. The non-profit flag is code, and it decodes to incredibly financially tight fisted and technically naive as an organization.
The OP's org likely spent money ONCE to have a professional set up their web presence, without any budget or plan for follow-on maintenance, upgrades, or refactoring. If they thought about it at all, they likely assumed they'd handle these issues with the luck of having someone tech proficient on staff or get someone to donate their time.
Thus, offering what the OP ought to do is a waste of time. It'd be a huge project to write up the justification to spend significant money on this, and the management chain will want to see alternatives have been explored, first.
So, to the OP: your best bet will be to look over the high customer-service ISPs mentioned in these comments. Another alternative is to see if a local college/uni with an IT/CS program has any fourth year undergrads capable enough to be productive as interns.
Luke, help me take this mask off