Moving to the Cloud: Part 1 – How many nodes do I need?

One of the most commonly asked questions we receive prior to the client signing up, is “How many nodes will my site require?” Unfortunately we don’t have a 3 step mathematical equation to figure out exactly what you need, but using your traffic figures, your current hosting arrangement and expected growth we can pretty easily figure that out.
Most sites coming from a shared server really only need a couple of nodes. Something to keep in mind with a shared server is your site is sharing resources with every other site on the server, so while 600 MHZ may not seem like a lot, it may in fact be significantly more than your site is currently using. If your site is only hosting images, HTML pages, and some downloads, typically 1 node is all you need. The static files (thankfully) don’t use a whole lot of processing power, requiring the web server to only send out the data.
However, if your site using dynamic content containing programming languages like CGI, PHP, Ruby, with some sort of database backend, then we typically recommend the client go with at least 2 nodes. The processing of the files, while also requiring data from a database just requires a little bit more power… and we enjoying delivering it.
If your site is coming from another VPS provider or from a Dedicated Server, one of the first recommendations we make is to match up the CPU & RAM levels. So if you currently have a server with a 2.4 GHZ Processor and a 1 GB of Ram, you’d likely want to go with 4 nodes, which would actually give you 500 MBs of additional RAM for growth.
Are there any sites you can’t handle? Certainly a site like CNN.Com would be difficult, but through the power of our cloud VPS servers, and CDN hosting, it’ll be quite difficult to give us something we can’t handle. We enjoy the challenge of handling the growing the site, so if you have a site that needs a host, get in touch. More than likely we have what you need.