Make CiviCRM faster with an external SQL Database?

[markjohan]

Hello Everyone,

There is a lot of information on this forum, also the question about hosting you see often. But when you install the CiviCRM plugin, you can choose the database host etc.

Question:
1: Is it possible to use a external SQL database for the CiviCRM plugin, and will this speed up the system?
2: if YES, does someone know where i can find the fastest database? (for a good price off course) 

Thanks!

[Hershel]

1: Is it possible to use a external SQL database for the CiviCRM plugin

Yes.

will this speed up the system?

I think you mean using a third party MySQL server. If it will be faster or not depends on the speed of your web server and the speed of the MySQL server and also the connection between the two.

In general, I don't think this idea will make your site faster.

[markjohan]

ok, thank you.

Can you give me some advice about a fast hosting? What is the most importent thing for CiviCRM? (i use wordpress and the demo site http://wordpress.demo.civicrm.org/ works very fast! )

I hope you can help me with my choice.

Thanks.

[Hershel]

There are two issues with hosting. One is the find a host near you, but that's not always such an issue. The main issue is to find a host with fast servers and a track record of hosting CiviCRM well. The Hosting Providers page on the CiviCRM.org site is the best place to find such. As noted there, that list is hosts who "specialize in CiviCRM hosting."

[markjohan]

Ok thanks, i have read that. but there are no Host specialists in the Netherlands. should i use CiviHosting? (Europe)

Thanks

[Hershel]

should i use CiviHosting? (Europe)

I am unable to answer that question.

[joanne]

Hershel didn't answer your last question because CiviHosting is his company. He will answer general questions about hosting, but never advocates for his own company above others on the forum.

I am in Australia and would consider any hosting provider within Australia as "near to me".  Given that Europe and Australia are fairly similar in size I think you should consider CiviHosting (Europe) as near to you.

[conductorchris]

I can tell you that I've had a good experience with civiHosting.  And with Hershel, who I regard as a really decent guy (based only on our business dealings with him).

The first question is if you will have a dedicated or virtual server (much more work, but more horsepower) or go with a shared hosting plan.

We started out with a cheap mass market host (ThinkHost) and for civiCRM it was awful.  Slow (painfully sometimes) with all kinds of errors.  After a year or so of that I came to my senses and decided mission critical systems were something we needed to pay for.  I went from a $5 a month plan to the $15 a month plan with civihosting and oh!  what a difference that made.  My (not especially educated) sense is the vast majority of shared hosting options are not particularly suitable for civiCRM, but civihosting is. 

In my experience I wouldn't say that civiCRM or Joomla (which is what we use) is particularly FAST on civiHosting, but it's not notably slow either and nobody has ever complained about it.  Given my earlier experience, I think it would be easy to do worse and hard for us to do better (for our needs.  I do not have the skills to run a dedicated server.  A virtual server would be the next step up and it would have to be managed). 

Christopher

[2020media]

I think "it depends" is the right answer to whether using an external SQL database is faster.

For us in a shared hosting setting, we do set up CiviCRM with one of our standalone MySQL servers. This would be in contrast to say just a WordPress blog site on shared hosting, where we would use a local MySQL server.
We've found this setu[ to give better performance. I guess it's because Civi makes much more demands on the MySQL server AND webserver compared to a simple database driven website that is mostly just doing database reads.

However the caveat to this option would be if your site was the only site on the server - this would be when a larger CiviCRM instance is being deployed, perhaps with many users working together. Now in this scenario, often a single VPS or Dedicated server would be used - and with the right tweaks this should work well. However if you did have performance problems, probably the first thing your sys admin would suggest would be to split MySQL and web front end into different servers.

So in summary, I go from separate to shared to back to separate again.

Rex Wickham
2020media.com