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Can you help me with my capacity planning?
We are in a process of building up a social app.
Initially we will have only a few thousands of users than will grow with time.
Which would be the best and suitable hosting for this purpose?
Grid, cloud or VPS? (it has to be economic, as we are just starting up)
The hosting needs to be strong, so, in case our app has increase in the user base all of a sudden it wont break up or slow down the app.
Our app is in PHP, MySQL.
we will have only a few thousands of users
That's a meaningless metric. Your requirements will depend on the complexity of the app, the size of the data and the number of concurrent hits.
it has to be economic, as we are just starting up
Again - that's not a meaningful metric - how much do you plan on spending?
IMHO a VPS gives you the most control over how the application is managed, but this is not even the tip of the iceberg in planning a scalable architecture.
C.
If you want 90% of your site done for you out of the box, check out Pinax (pinaxproject.com). If you don't grok Python or Django, It may be worth your while to learn it (or hire out the customization) rather than writing the app from scratch in PHP or Perl.
You will be happy with Webfaction for hosting django or ruby on rails. Their shared hosting will work for a while, and even their VPS plans are pretty competitive.
If you not quite sure about your exact requirements, which is common for start up, you never know if you going to have linear or exponential growth of your app. You can be well prepared for this if you code your app and install infrastructure that can scale out as you grow.
Go back and think about the requirements you can specify. You have a lot of unknowns, but think about best and worse case.
Shop around for the best deal on hosting, The competition is fierce, but beware there are a lot of hosting companies that 'sell a good config' on paper, but can't delivery what their glossy web site offers. At least try and get a company that will offer you a good SLA.
Again, what's you budget. ? $0, $1000 a month..? unlimited?
