Greetings everyone,
I am the client whom Mark assisted; my apologies for the delay in writing this review.
I will start of by explaining the size and demand if my community. I have a database of almost 2000 users and will usually have 300 active users online between 9 P.M. - 12 A.M. EST. My average online user count is around 20 (100 if you consider my chat).
I am continously growing my community and I decided to build an entirely new and robust platform for them to play in. I purchased all of stack ideas components, as well as very resource heavy chat application known as comet chat and I immediately began to realize that I had entered into an entire new world of what was needed with regards to server resources.
I was initially using a shared solution with a host that was rated as having the best support for Joomla sites. I had prepaid for one year but after a few months I began receiving warnings because my site was using up 600% of the shared resources; it was clear that I needed to move to a new set up. I will not mention the name of the hosting provider because I do not want to drag their site name on the ground but I will say that their support team is very good and always available. They helped me switch from a shared server to a cloud vps and even gave me a good price for a 2core/2gb set up. This however is when all my problems started and when I began to lose faith in clour based VPS servers.
I began crashing at 30 online users so I decided to beef up my settings. I switched to 3core/4gb of ram and that helped me get to the 50 user mark before crashing. I began an endless cycle of upgrading until I reached 8core/8gb of ram but even that could only support 100 online users. I sentered several emails to tech support, stack ideas and comet chat. My host blamed comechat as being the reason why I was crashing as the extension was sending many queries to my database. Comet chat laid the blame on my custom components. Mark explained that there are many factors in optimizing a site and that the first step was getting off of a cloud based VPS which did not support fret root access so that we could eliminate C panel. I was intrigued by what Mark told me because he was the only one offering a real solution.
I counted down the days for my expiration date of my service to come to an end so that I could instantly contact Mark to help me make the switch, and tags what I did. For a reasonable fee, on a day where Mark had an already busy schedule, my Linode server was spun up. For half the price of my existing host, Mark had me up and running on my brand new VPS. I couldn't believe the difference in cost, as well as the fact that I was given more hard drive space and bandwidth. It almost seemed to good to be true, but then it got even better. A fee days ago I launched a new branch of my site which meant a large amount of traffic. I sat watching nervously as my traffic increase. First I hit 80 and everything was stable, then 130 which was a new bench mark for me and everything was stable. It wasn't until I saw 300 users online without any issues that I could finally breath a sigh of relief. Not only did the new server help me with my server load issues, it also helped me with my yearly budget as I will now be saving $1000/year on hosting fees.
For anyone out there experiencing issues, please contact Mark and listen to what he has to say. You won't be disappointed.