Suggestions for hosting site

Hi, I have been looking at this software for over two weeks now and I must say I am impressed, many reviews said bad things about this script and to stay well clear unless I had hundreds of £ to spend, I don't have hundreds of pounds to spend and I certainly am not dissatisfied. 

I have run into a snag, my host said they would only allow me to run dolphin if I turned off all the chat features, removed the video and music sections and a few other things so if we decide to go down the route of keeping our members informed by using Dolphin Pro (in one form or another) I would say we should move hosts. Unfortunately we have 20 months left on our hosting contract as we paid up in full for two years and as a Charity we don't have much money to spend on hosting as it stands, With this in mind what would you kind people from this forum suggest hosting wise to run a Dolphin setup with 50% of the modules installed and running (as many are not needed) with a user-base of over 13k, before you say anything just because these 13k will have accounts we certainly don't get that amount of traffic, we are lucky to have 20 concurrent users (I don't know how many connections each make to the database though) at any one time with many users using us to collect private messages, there is a core base of about 18 users who will use the system all day every day while the rest are simply users collecting data or sending/receiving messages via private messages, chat, messenger and the odd shout box.

So what do we do, I know a shared hosting wont be able to handle this (please correct me if I am wrong but I know the server resources for 4 people using chat, messenger, timeline, blogs and files is quite high). Do we go with a VPS or a dedicated server? we really don't have much disposable income, so cost is the highest factor, then resources and reliability with scalability being the lowest. As well as your recommendation for vps or dedicated server we have been asked what hardware we need, so what would you suggest from your experience (again please remember we need to keep the costs low)?

Again I have enjoyed exploring the system and especially this forum, until now I have only had to post two times before this for information and that is down to the community being active and you all explain things on a level where even me, someone who has no background in this area of IT can understand. Thanks

zarconia.net

I am also gona start my website again. I was comparing both zarconia and denre. what i found out that in same price denre is providing more storage better RAM and faster processors for a dedicated server but i don't know about the customer support at denre.com and the bandwidth performance. I heard good reviews about zarconia so ill do the toss and will choose either of them unless any 1 give me a negative feedback about denre.com then ill for sure choose zarconia.net. Main thing ill consider who will allow me to host on nginx webserver along with the support. one thing that you also have to consider is the setup fee at zarconia.

I have used a variety of different servers - both dedicated and shared. I will say this - if running a Dolphin site, it is always best to go with someone who knows Dolphin. Zarconia servers are setup perfectly for Dolphin sites. I have just setup a 3rd account with them. One for a client, one for my son, and one for me.

I use exactly the same hardware and datacenters as Zarconia, but just as you pointed out, no setup fee, lower prices AND all my servers are managed. This means you don't have to worry about O.S. patches, etc. I will also setup your server from scratch with the software you need. If you prefer nginx with mariaDB or apache with mysql, or any different combination, it can  be done and maintained for you.

I offer 24x7 support and indepth knowledge of Dolphin. You most likely won't see any of my customers posting in these forums because all their issues get directly solved by me.

If you like to know more about me and my professional background feel free to contat me, or see my linkedin profile: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/denre

I like the look of the denre small the resources are:

• 2x 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon X2
• 4GB DDR3
• 2x 320 GB SATA HDDs
• Unlimited bandwidth
• 100 M/bit
• CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu
• Plesk 11

What sort of traffic and simultaneous connections would this easily handle? It has became blatantly obvious that shared hosting or vps is not on the cards and dedicated server is the way to go. What I now need is direction in the required hardware resources

Thank you for your help and advice it is greatly and honestly appreciated

Don't expect miracles from this configuration, but it is sufficient for a small site that has not yet many visitors.

The network can handle enough traffic and your main limitation is the hardware. The size of the database, the modules you install and how many blocks there are displayed on a page determine the amount of memory that is needed per connection and the time it takes to load a page.

The simultaneous connections a server can handle also depends on what your visitors are doing on the site. For example, browsing takes less memory than posting something.

If you're not sure how many visitors to expect, I think this budget option is a good choice. And since I do not charge a setup fee, you can always upgrade to a different server at minimal cost.