We’ll soon be launching our first Omeka S site and I need to procure/provision the production hosting on a very limited budget, but can find no documentation or recommendation on server memory and CPU usage.
Our new Omeka S Site has approx 125,000 resources and 1 million values in the database. The existing site that Omeka S is replacing averages 250 page views a day but regularly peaks at 1,000. So not a huge resource required, but we’d like to keep it as responsive as possible at peak as it’s a high prestige site. We do make heavy use of Mapping (15k points on a custom map block on the home page!) and Faceted Browse which might affect things?
Basically I’m trying to decide if we can get away with a cheap shared hosting on someone like Reclaim, and if so how much RAM/CPU we will need, or if I do need to provision a full VPS?
We have many users who successfully use shared hosting. In terms of making a solid recommendation, shared hosting is tricky just because you don’t have control over how much load there is on everything else that’s on the same shared application or database servers. That kind of thing would tend to vary based on provider but also sometimes just on what server you’re assigned to, and so on.
In terms of virtualized cloud hosting we’ve seen success with pretty small servers in terms of memory, in the 1 to 2 GB range. Ideally you’d want enough memory that the database can keep most of your data in memory, and then some more for the PHP processes to serve pages. For most of those kinds of services it’s pretty easy to start small and scale up resources if you do find you need them, which might be a good idea.
Things like Cloudflare or other caching/proxying sitting in front could be worth looking into also, as they can be a way to make small/cheap hosting more viable with more traffic. You’re not talking about a particularly large amount of traffic, but of course there’s bot/crawler traffic and things like that to consider.