Hi,
Does anyone on here run a large membership site (circa 125,000 users) using s2Member? If so, i’d be keen to understand who you host with and the package you have etc.
My current host seem to be struggling with the fact I have a large site and the fact it’s a membership site with associated caching of logged in users.
Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks Ed
I`ld get a nice root server for so many users. I only have like 3000 Unique Visitors a day - and about 1TB of data downloads - besides sometimes on busy evening hearing complaints about download speed dropping down a bit the server (Core i7-6700, 64GB Ram, 512GB NVME Raid, plus 6TB HDD for the data downloads) the server is mainly just idling along - so I’m never CPU or RAM bound - using nginx and caching plugin (couldn’t get Varnish or a nice server based caching running properly). price at Hetzner 35€/months (39.99 including german VAT).
Yeah and I think the download speed is dropping a bit because Hetzner does not really give you 1Gbit/s dedicated but rather 300-400Mbit/s only after some burst time depending on your server rack you may be more or less lucky.
Maybe without all those downloads a hosted environment like Siteground on a big contract would be fine - and less work for maintenance. But then if you have some Linux experience running a root server is not much work (5-6 hours to setup for me, 20minutes maintenance per month). If you have lots of big downloads root server at least for downloads is a must anyhow. Hosting or Cloud simply is too expensive if your websites has about 300GB of downloadable data.
Having that many users is not as important as what they do. If all they do is renew once a year, that would only average about 14/hour. Then a modest VPS or even high performance shared might do the job.
If they interact more often, your needs will be greater. Then you might consider a larger VPS, scalable cloud solution or dedicated server.
I strongly suggest you do some measurements to get a handle on your needs.
I agree with Sonja. You need measurements.
One of them should be to check how long each member spends on the site. Ideally, you’d want to know their browsing patterns too. I say this because you are caching pages for logged-in users, and that takes a lot of space and, potentially, a lot of other resources too. The irony is that it is often counter-productive. But without information, you won’t be in a position to know what would work best for you.