I’m trying to work out what hosting to get for a small pop up site to take registrations from an EDM campaign. We will send the emails out from mailchimp or similar, and then the site will need to show a couple of info pages and a registration form. Ill proccess the form with cakephp to save to the db and email the registrant.
The email will go out to around 10,000 recipients – so i guess worse case scenario is they all open it at once and click to go to the site, if unlikely.
Is VPS required for this, or will cloud hosting do it? How do people go about estimating that?
In general cloud hosting means a VPS, and then some. Usually the difference is that cloud providers often provide other services (like maybe a CDN, robust APIs, etc) and provide on-demand usage-based billing. This sounds perfect for you since you can just spin up additional instances (if you have a proxy/load balancer) or resize your instances if you find yourself running out of CPU or RAM.
However, cloud services can be a bit ambiguous at times, so let me break it down further. If you are considering a VPS you probably want to go with a provider that gives you a “cloud” VPN where with on-demand (hourly) billing so you can add/resize your VPNs as needed. My current favorite is Rackspace Cloud Servers, but others (like Amazon EC2) are good too. The main reason I prefer Rackspace is that the instances aren’t transient (all data is gone on reboot) like Amazon’s, which can complicate system architecture.