Sorry to post to main with this, but if anyone would like a spot of work this guy is looking urgently for someone. I've taken on more work than is comfortable already, so have no time. Let me know if interested and I'll pass on his email etc. Thanks, Jenny

Hi Jenny,

About 4 months ago my mum passed me your email address about a bit of freelance sys admin work for a site I’ve been building with a friend for the last couple of years. In the next couple of weeks we are finally starting a proper advertising campaign, hence I’m panicking about having absolutely no concept of when/why/if our site will get overloaded/crash/go down.

We are currently on a 1GB slice with slicehost.com, running a Django 1.1 site, with a PostGreSQL database and Apache 2/memcached (the memcached thing I am taking on faith from a previous developer who said he’d set it up, but he wasn’t the most trustworthy guy!). the website is www.gayhop.com, and at present have never had more than maybe 10-20 people online at one time (at that was just for a few days when we told friends about it, generally it’s just 2 or 3 of us connected simultaneously).

I know from various reading around and asking slicehost support that our options are either to simply throw more servers into the equation (which I guess gets expensive pretty quickly) or go for a setup similar to this: http://rackerhacker.com/redundant-cloud-hosting-configuration-guide/ with a DB server, a static media server, a load balancing server, and an actual app server (or several of each).

As you may guess, I know very little about sys admin stuff. I’m a frontend developer mostly, although I’m fairly competent with Django now, having had to write a lot of code to get things working the way we want after our Django developer left in September. But I know nothing of Apache/linux/server setup.

I guess what would be great is to know:

a) What you think we should do regarding our setup to minimise the chance of going down

b) How much you’d charge to advise us and do the work, OR if you’re way too busy – whether you can recommend anybody else?

{I asked him for a few more details....}

Hi Jenny, thanks for your response.

The idea for now would be hiring somebody to do a one-off job of advising us on the best steps to take to cope with higher numbers, and then implementing those. so for now no support contract, although if we find somebody good that would obviously be something we will need in the future.

Our slice was setup by our last developer, I did none of it and really do know nothing! It’s running Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) according to SliceHost.

In terms of user numbers – really no idea! I’d want a setup that can at the very least cope with 100 online users at one time (maybe our current one can – I’ve no clue), though if advertising goes well this would hopefully quite soon get up towards the thousand mark. At that point though I’m sure we would need to re-evaluate our server setup anyway, and get a sys admin to do serious upgrading for us.

Thanks again for your help already.

Kyle Duncan