MySQL & Communities/Forums?

[LoStEdeN]

Hello, I've recently become interested in starting a community-based website and have been testing out a few thing on my present server. I plan on buying another server and transferring over just as soon as I work out all the bugs with my skin/design.

I've been concerned however, every once in awhile I'll recieve little errors with the database, here are a couple:

[i]mySQL error: Too many connections[/i]

or

[i]User '__name__' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 50000)[/i]

I don't even know if these are limits that can be changed or just errors in general.

It's troubling because I have no idea how limited a MySQL database can be. And before I go about looking for a host specifically for a MySQL-driven community I want to make sure there are no limitations.

I've gone to other communities in my i-net experience and have never seen any kind of error with the database, and these communities are HUGE! I just wonder what I should be looking for, as far as hosting/database capabilities.

[wickning1]

I'm confused, are you getting those errors when you're the only one on your site? Or do you already have a sizable audience?

Are you renting a shared server? Your host may be limiting your account to try to ensure quality of service for everyone on that machine, or it could just be misconfigured.

In general, MySQL has a lot of performance parameters to help keep your machine from crashing, but if you tune those parameters, it is only limited by the hardware capabilities. Compared with other database solutions, MySQL is one of the best performers around, so you're not going to do much better with the same hardware.

If you're looking at very high traffic, you may have to look into multi-server load balancing. Some webhosts will manage that kind of thing for you (for a price). Very few sites ever really push a modern server machine to its limits unless they are writing bad queries.

The first thing you should do when you are experiencing performance problems is start tracking down slow queries and find ways to speed them up.

[LoStEdeN]

yes im the only one on the website, thats why its so vexing at times, what im really wondering is if you know of a host that would be good for a sizable percentage of traffic and what i should be looking for, as far as services offered by hosts

[wickning1]

Just make sure the host provides the technologies you plan to use, and has good pricing for a variety of service levels. It's hard to predict how much power/bandwidth you're going to need for a site, especially if you don't know if it will take off and become popular. Community sites in particular; they usually either experience exponential growth (a large user base attracts more users) or stagnate and die off.

You should start off small and upgrade your service as needed. Make sure you write your web application in such a way that upgrading or moving servers will be easy. You'll probably want to make it PHP4 compatible as most shared-server hosts are still using it. If you rent a whole machine then you usually have the freedom to install whatever you want, but that can be expensive.

Personally I would recommend a host that can offer you a linux/unix/bsd server running at least Apache, MySQL 5, Perl, and PHP 5. SSH access is often helpful as well. Be sure to consider price, storage, server specs, number of other users on your server(s), overall transfer limits, what happens when your users bust your limit, uptime, and turnaround on your support requests.

[LoStEdeN]

thank you for the excellent advice and support, very helpful and very friendly/understanding, wish me luck!