Who and how do I contact someone about getting my own site?
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They throw the ball, I hit it.
They hit the ball, I catch it.
Willie Mays
Offline Doug Hazard
Richweb Staff (Admin)
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Posts: 30
CFB / MBB Junkie
http://twocentsradio.net
Re: What ‘sports sites’ do you host and what hosting service do you use?
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2014, 09:49:05 pm »
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We’ll be getting some of our customers to share their sites, however, since I’m both a Richweb Teamie and Tech Admin for a very happy Richweb client, I’ll be happy to share the sites Lanny Beavers hosts here on Richweb.com.
I am the Tech Admin (read: right hand guy) for LRB Sports Media, Inc. (www.lrbsports.com), which owns and operates www.Hogville.net, www.GridironHistory.com and www.FearlessFriday.com.
Speaking STRICTLY as Tech Admin for LRB here: Hogville is an incredibly large UNofficial fan community for the Arkansas Razorbacks. Due to its sheer size, we outgrew our multi-server hosting platform and needed to have a solution that could scale up quickly and easily, especially during peak times (College Football and Basketball seasons). We heard about Richweb from another (current) Richweb customer (who also operates an SEC oriented fan community for the Alabama Crimson Tide). After doing our due diligence, we reached out to Richweb with a spec sheet of our technical requirements. After going back and forth with Jon Larsen (President) and John Donna (WordPress Guru and all around awesome guy), we mutually agreed to do a trial run. Since this was in the middle of football season, it would essentially be “Trial by Fire”, especially after dealing with a downed web server that reduced our capacity by 50%.
We made the switch in late September of 2013, I believe, and haven’t looked back. Truth be told, the solution Richweb offered Lanny (and I) has not only met our expectations, it’s performed admirably. We still haven’t broken the all time mark of most users online (currently sitting at 7,368 people online at the same time, on April 10th, 2012), we did hit 4,629 people online during this year’s National Signing Day for the 2014-15 CFB season.
For the first time in 5+ years (I’ve been with Lanny since 2003), I did not have to turn off any features of Hogville. Nor did I have to turn off Guest Lurking. We had a couple minor hiccups along the way (basic server configuration tweeks), however, I can equivocally state that I have the utmost confidence that the servers will purr along as we get ready to enter our peak season.
Putting my Richweb Hat back on, the easiest way to contact us is to give us a call at 804-368-0421 and ask to speak to Jon Larsen or John Donna. You can always use the Online Contact form or shoot me an email, as well (dhazard [AT] corp [DOT] richweb [DOT] com), or send me a private message. If you’re on Twitter, you can always contact us there by doing a mention on @RichwebInc. On Facebook? No problem! We’ve got you covered there, too! Check out Richweb, Inc. at your leisure.
We’re here to help you grow your website, both from a web developer standpoint and from a web hosting platform. Whatever your needs are, no matter how big or small, we’ll be right there with you to get you where you need to be.
(Yes, I realize the last sentence sounds a little cheesy, but it truly is what our company philosophy is built around. The only way we’re successful is if you’re successful, so, yes, we’re here to help out as you need us to.)
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Doug “Bear” Hazard
@BearlyDoug | @GridironHistory | @Hogville | http://gridironhistory.com
Co-Host of Two Cents Radio, powered by the SportsManCave.com Radio Network, Wednesday Nights from 8 PM to 10 PM Central, covering SEC and Sun Belt Sports.
Listen at SMCRadio.com and follow @TwoCentsRadio on Twitter!
Offline jlarsen
Richweb Staff (Admin)
Newbie
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Posts: 4
Re: What ‘sports sites’ do you host and what hosting service do you use?
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2014, 01:27:59 am »
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We use a clustered hosting configuration so a typical sports site will entail:
1. Load Balancer and CDN (content delivery for static files like jpegs, pngs, etc)
2. 2+ backend virtual machines running apache
3. A MySQL database for each app. Typical customers are running WordPress for the front end of their site and board ware for the message boards, so 2 MySQL dbs.
We have custom software and admin best practices that keep the virtual apache nodes (vservers) in sync. So as your site grows larger, we just add more backends. The larger customers have 5 to 6 backends for peak periods of usage. Thats access to 50+ physical cpu cores when you need it as we use dual quad core blades for each backend physical host. We can also provision additional CPU cores for MySQL if the site is database intensive.
Most of our sports sites need a little database tuning and cleanup once we bring them in, and some help with caching and the speedups are generally pretty dramatic once those initial steps are done.
We also have gigabit fiber with redundant upstream routing to 3 different carriers plus redundant firewalls so if you need to increase your bandwidth plan, we can do that quickly. Most small to medium sites sports sites use a 3 to 10 Mbit/sec plan, large sites may need 15 to 20 Mbit/sec. We allow customers to burst for special events, like a big game or signing day as needed – just let us know.