Facebook application hosting

[bigsammya]

Hi All.

I've done a quick search for this topic but couldn't find anything related to it.

Has anyone used webhostinguk to host any facebook apps? I seem to get quite a few timeouts as facebook expects to receive data back from the app within 10 seconds - if it doesn't it errors.

The app isn't doing anything too complicated, just a few MySQL calls to a small database then returning the results - no complicated joins or anything.

I'm on the bog standard £20 / month web hosting package, has anyone had more success with a better package? Anyone any experience with other hosts and facebook?

Thanks!

[paul]

As far my knowledge Webhostinguk support PHP, Java, ROR, Perl, Python script and other scripts which are generally being used in Facebook Apps. To deliver full user experience and protect privacy of your users I would suggest to go for secured server for which I would highly recommend webhosting.uk.com.

[bigsammya]

Hi Paul

Thanks for the quick reply.

I am using php / MySQL which does work fine, and I appreciate your comments about security - we don't actually store any personal information on users but it is still an important issue to bear in mind.

My biggest concern is over performance. At the moment the data is flowing as such:

Request for facebook page (? -> US)
Request from facebook page to app (US -> UK)
App makes FQL (proprietry facebook SQL) calls (UK -> US)
App makes SQL calls (UK -> UK)
App returns rendered HTML (UK -> US)
Page returned to user (US -> ?)

Are the secured servers that you mention dedicated? Cost is also a factor and a dedicated server would be quite expensive at this time. Given the viral growth of facebook apps this could be an option further down the line but at present the load is not great, which is why I mentioned other hosts as perhaps someone has experience of hosting facebook apps in the US with more success, or has used webhostinguk and experienced no problems?

Regards

[John]

Hello,

I'm not immediately aware of any users doing the same thing, but I'm sure they are. However, that's not really what shared hosting is for. Have you opened a ticket to our support department yet? They might be able to investigate this for you but with it being a shared server they are limited into what changes they can make.

Another thing for you to consider is a VPS. A VPS gives you more resources and also will allow our technicians to make more changes to configuration files as they won't impact other users.

[bigsammya]

Hi There

No, I've not opened a ticket yet - wasn't sure if it was specific to my package or due to the latency of all the cross-atlantic calls!

I'm not sure what other technical changes could be made to the setup to increase performance since its not doing anything complicated - just db access, althouhg the extra performance from a VPS could be handy.

Anyone had any experience of actually using an fb app? Otherwise I'll try and do some testing, perhaps raise a ticket and look into upgrade / moving options.

Thanks all.