I need help determining if we can really use Drupal and MySQL for a new site being planned for the Special Olympics of Northern California. I just read through another thread here by a "novice" and that "novice" knows WAY more than I do, so please know that while I'm a good Drupal designer, I know NOTHING about real performance issues.
The Special Olympics has a limited budget and I, nor anyone, will be setting up and managing the server configuration. We are looking at commercial hosts like GoDaddy.com and I'd like to use GoDaddy if it's not ridiculous for our needs.
The site, http://sonc.org, is not currently a Drupal site, but a Dreamweaver site (mostly). The Drupal site is being modeled after:
Compete.com and Quantcast show the site averaging from 3000-9000 visits per month. The site has a Google ranking of 5/10.
The future Drupal site will have about the same number of pages that you can see at the current sonc site.
- An important goal is for the site to store information/profiles/registration data for about 13,000 volunteers and 11,000 athletes. Probably a VERY low percentage of those users will be logging in regularly. The site will host an events calendar and a listing of sports ands the counties associated with the sports. There will be pages for County information, which counties stored as a content type. There will be school programs and sports stored and content types and referenced to counties.
The largest record set would seem to be the Users with the volunteer and athlete records.
** I will be using custom panels on most pages, with Views-created blocks and content panes. Primarily because they are wanting the page to have a certain row structure.
Also, there will be photo galleries and video galleries. I'm hoping that the video gallery will just be embedded video fields of videos hosted off-site. However the photo galleries will probably, maybe be hosted on-site.
From what you're hearing so far, can this site be practically hosted with someone like GoDaddy, using the latest Drupal 6 (SIX) and MySQL Community Server 5.0.91 with MyISAM storage engine apparently and PHP 5.2.17? This would be LAMP/Linux/Apache. I'd have to ask GoDaddy about InnoDB. I don't truly understand the importance of the storage engine, sorry- I'm not a server admin really.
Also, GoDaddy does offer Windows hosting where I assume I could use SQL server as the underlying database.
I know my question clarifies that I'm clueless, so please reply with "kid gloves". Regardless of what happens, the Special Olympics of NorCal needs a cost-effective and self-managing web hosting database server. Or so it seems to me so far.
If you see this during this week of March 1, 2011, please reply with advice ASAP since we have to decide what our database options are. But any replies at any time will be good. PLEASE HELP!