UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic OK, an ISP in the USA then...

So, long story short... we're probably looking for another ISP to host our site.

We're not _huge_ by a lot of your standards, but then again, we're not exactly a group of 27 either. (18k members with 479,486 posts since 2002 and we're currently on a dedicated 1.5Mbps line.) Usual number of users (including spiders) online in a 30 min period is 150-200, but we've gone as high as 700ish.

I guess I'm just looking for the pros/cons of running a site from a co-lo as opposed to a dedicated ISP (say, godaddy for example). I mean, the lure of the $15/mo unlimited account from godaddy seems to really fill all of our needs on paper. However, call me a control freak, but I'd really like control of the OS and MySQL. Am I stupid for wanting that? I like the ease of just dumping the db to my home server to test upgrades prior to putting them into production (and admittedly, I'm guessing I COULD do that with godaddy.) I guess I just have a bad taste in my mouth after dealing with other ISP's where they force you to use their tools to make things "easier" when in reality they just get in the way.

Admittedly, the $100ish/month we'd be paying a colo (1GB RAM, 1/4 core guaranteed, burstable to 8 cores, 15GB storage, 10TB/mo transfer) is a LOT less than what we're paying now, but if it's stupid to pay even that much... well, I'm all for saving money.

Side note: I'm a Systems Engineer for my day job, so administering one more system isn't a big deal. I can get it to the point where it "just runs" rather easily.

I'd never put a site that size on a $15/month shared server unless I didn't really care if it was up or down

I use a managed VPS through Future Hosting - 2gb of dedicated ram, 50GB of hard drive space, 100 domain plesk 9.2.1 with current php and mysql, quick service for ~$80/month. I believe bandwidth is "unlimited" - not sure if that's accurate, but we've used 55GB so far this month.

If you're looking for control, I'd agree with Allen, a VPS would be an affordable way to go...

I don't really like the expense that these "cool" control panels come with, then Webmin can do the same for free though ...

A managed VPS is going to cost you more than an unmanaged one, but if you're new to maintaining a server, Managed is definitely the way to go...

I do know some people here are hesitant to suggest a host anymore. Due to the economy today.
But for me I am using a host that has multi tiered plans. That allow me to choose from the cheapee plan to vps or dedicated and with lite or fully managed sites.
So that is where I am at.

Yeah, I'm a control freak. BUT I also understand that with control comes responsibility... Responsibility I could be paying someone else to take.

I actually hate Webmin too. It doesn't get in the way like things that are forced upon you, and it also doesn't seem to freak out if you do things the good "old fashioned way" either. So I much prefer it if I HAVE to have some GUI interface.

Yeah, I've just gotta decide how much responsibility I want to take. I could literally run the thing out of my house and it would just fly (gotta love fibre to the home) but I don't want the responsibility for all the redundancy I'd like.

I appreciate the "sanity check" on the $15/mo. solutions. I'll look into Future Hosting. Their managed solution for ≈$80/mo seems to "only" include 1gb RAM at this point, but beyond that, it seems like a good place to look at as well.

a wise man once said


Truer words have never been spoken.

BTW, 1GB ram on a server isn't that bad; your shared memory will help on any system...

if you're looking for more than that, you'd likely need a dedicated, or at least a semi dedicated machine (a vps with minimal users)

Honestly, by the size of your forum, it doesn't look like you'd need more than a linux machine with 512mb ram, 10gb disk and 1tb transfer...

I run my sites right out of my house.

My Rack

I also have a few others sites on there too. Helps pay the bills.

They have specials listed at webhosting talk forums for double the ram (that's how I got 2gb) - there's probably one there now tho I haven't checked.

I chose managed because for a few bucks more a month I don't have to stay on top of it, someone else who's up all night is doing it for me

I ran a home server for a while... the lack of redundancy in connections, hardware (and support ), was what made me think that wasn't so smart.

Server fall down go boom.

Uh... as awkward as this sounds... nice... rack JAISP.? I sent you a PM.

Thanks Allen for pointing out the specials at webhosting talk. There is a special now which honestly seems to be a fantastic deal. 40% off for the life of the VPS AND double the bandwidth and RAM.

$42/mo for 2GB/RAM 50GB storage/ 1300GB bandwidth (or $51 managed) seems to be a steal. From what I've read (not just your account) Future Hosting seems to be pretty reputable. I tend to be leaning that way. For that, I could have a backup environment ready to go at a moment's notice and still be paying less than elsewhere.

I have to admit, I'm a Solaris guy through and through, but Linux is looking more and more appealing for this (considering it's running on Linux now.)

And Gizmo: I know that we only NEED 512-768MB of RAM, but more is better in two ways: 1) It's more - duh. 2) It reduces the number of VPS's on the box - thus the chances of contention go down just a little bit. I know this doesn't require THAT much processing power, but it doesn't hurt. With the extra RAM it allows us the potential to add Gallery or the like if we so desired.

With that said, their lower tiers suddenly look more appealing too.

Anyway, we've got stuff to "discuss."

Thanks for all the help (so far).

Just wanted to reference your #2; I've seen (and had) dedicated servers with anything from 256mb dedicated ram to 32gb dedicated ram; so the fact that it has anything to do with how many users are shoved on the box can be misleading...

Not to mention, memory utilization isn't everything; theres also cpu usage and io timing... You'll notice that a lot of vps providers don't really state how many people they throw on a machine, what the scalable ram is, or how fast/type of processors are available...

FWIW, I've been hosting with a VPS from Servint for many years.

$49/month - Managed
CentOS
1TB Bandwidth
30GB Space
768MB RAM Guaranteed - 1.5GB Burst
4 IP Addresses
WHM/cPanel/Plesk/reselling/yadda yadda yadda

They've always been super quick with support, at any time of day, via phone or email.

Well, I appreciate the input. We ended up choosing (well, I did ) Futurehosting.com.

Their special was a bit too good to pass up (though the Servint prices you mentioned seem pretty good too.)

I just wish I could get rid of cPanel (or Plesk) and still have it managed. I feel like I'm fighting cPanel WAY too often.

Other than that, so far so good.

Thanks.

Heh...

So, I figured I'd post an update to this (yeah, it's long, but honest.)

Things went fine in our VPS for a while. I even initially got "wow, this is the fastest it's ever been" comments.

THEN...

Things got slow.

So, I started poking around. It turns out (JAISP is laughing right now - I bow to his knowledge and experience) that the disk I/O was just flat out too slow. I mean, when iostat is reporting 90%+ iowait times for minutes on end, you know you've got problems. I wanted to get some bonnie++ numbers, but it wouldn't compile - I can only assume because of being in a virtual environment.

So, it took an act of congress to get FH to move us to another physical box, but they did it eventually. (They kept blaming the slowness on the SQL saying it was bad SQL and that we needed to fix that.) So, while I was writing back and forth with one of their techs one night (luckily, I was in New Zealand at the time, so the middle of the US night stuff was no big deal for me) I just gave up and shut down mysql completely. Once he saw that loading 400k worth of static images from apache took 30+ seconds, it was mostly downhill from there.

So, sure enough, a few days later, we're back to being slow. I was busy (you know, being in New Zealand for my day job and all...) so I just figured I'd shut off the post counts on the front page. We like to have the unread post counts on the front page. Yes, it's a resource hog but it's a resource hog we're not really willing to live without, but it seemed an acceptable short term fix. And it was. For maybe a day. But then things got slow. Again.

If I never see the following error again, it will be too soon:
When things were fast, they were fast. When things were slow, pages took 10-20 seconds to load (according to the debug line at the bottom). Posts were taking 30-40 seconds to post and then refresh the page. I tuned the heck out of mysql - all to basically no avail. (I learned a LOT about mysql tuning as I'm more of a Caché or Sybase guy.)

So, I basically gave up on the VPS at that point. To just be quick and dirty, I moved the mysql database to my home server but left apache on the VPS - mainly to avoid any further configuration changes. That worked surprisingly well. (Keep in mind, I have a 10Mbps U/D fibre connection at home.) I purposefully put the mysql db on my boot drive (7.2k SATAII) instead of my RAID to see what the I/O load would be like. Unsurprisingly, I never saw I/O usage over 2% on that disk, but load times were typically right around 1 second (which is honestly not bad with apache in Chicago and mysql 110ms away in Utah.) I would have just hosted the whole kit and caboodle from home, but I don't want the responsibility.

So, suffice it to say, I moved our board to ServerBeach last night. We're paying $109/mo (or 10% off that with a 1 year contract) for an Opty 1218, 2x500GB SATAII HD with a HW RAID1 and 2GB of RAM and unlimited bandwidth on a 10Mbps connection with off-server backup via ftp and a 3 hour HW SLA. It's not managed, but any one of our admins can open a ticket with SB for $15/call (if I'm not available) and they'll troubleshoot the mysql or the OS or whatever. Considering that's a LOT cheaper than what we were paying to colo a 2xP4 we owned, we're still happy even though it's more than the VPS. The front page unread numbers are no longer an issue and times are back down in the 0.00x second range (bad SQL and all ) and searches no longer scare me.

Anyway, such was our foray into the world of VPS's. I know not all VPS's are gonna be like that. I was courted by a local ISP for the business on one of their VPS's, but since it was roughly the same price as a dedicated server, it didn't make much sense to me.

A couple of side notes:
• I initially developed a real bad taste in my mouth for CentOS, but since SB won't support Solaris unless I jump through hoops, I gave Cent another chance. So far so good.
• I never did get CAPTCHA working on the VPS, but it's running fine (having done the same thing) for me now.
• I'm pretty sure that a somewhat modern single core CPU would have been absolutely fine for our needs, so even though the 1218 is not the fastest chip on the block, it's more than adequate.
• If you ever have to move a mysqldump, don't forget to compress it before moving. Our db is around 1GB including indices and the dump compressed from 760MBish to 130MBish using bz2. The other 2GB or so of data didn't compress nearly as well (as would be expected with images that are already compressed.)

I'm getting WAY too good at moving this website around... I hope once I upgrade to 7.5.3 that I don't need to touch it again for a good long while.

109$ a month? holy crap!

Their cheapest is $65/mo on a celeron with 1gb ram...

its funny because the vps i'm on is like 512mb ram lol

I think we may be talking about different worlds here... (And FWIW, it's $99/mo for the server and $10/mo for the off-server backup.) Any sort of higher end VPS tends to run around $80-$140/mo - especially places (look around at places like rackspace, mediatemple, Joyent etc). Dedicated servers can run quite a bit more. FH's cheapest dedicated server is $130/month. If you go look at webhostingtalk.com, even the small fly-by-night places charge you around $70 for a p4 with 1GB of RAM and one hard drive. You can get an Atom box for less if that's of interest...

To us, approx $1/day is worth it to avoid the risk of someone else impacting the performance of our website. A VPS would have been fine if we had dedicated storage or only had 1 or 2 hits a minute, but those times when we have 3 to 5 page requests per second for 30 seconds or more, it's tough to keep up on shared disks. It's just not worth it to us to play the oversold VPS game...

(Admittedly, going back to dedicated is possibly a kneejerk reaction, but it did leave a bad taste in my, and all of our users mouths...)

I think I kind of predicted this in a kind of way back when you first were looking for a host. I do not wish to say anything like I told you but it really sucks when you have these problems.

I have been through all of this in the past. Have had host's hose my site just to get me mad enough to move off their service. I even had one tell me if I think I can do a better job then go ahead and try. That dude is outta business and I tried all right. I now own my own and have some of his customers. I never hear from them other then them begging me for a bill every now and again. I always forget to bill my customers.

I have became some sort of Eisenstein with Linux in many ways. My computer store buddy, whom I helped get the place when he bought it, sat and watched me do some stuff from the store one day in the servers all command line rewriting security files in "pico", kind of like notepad, while the server was running and then recompile the stuff. Kind of blew him away.

I have came far and have a long way to go that's for sure. But I am in the position that if I want it then I just do it. It cost me no more or less and I just do what I want.

I'm currently in the process of building an online radio station with a complete radio station setup minus the Radio Frequency transmitters but broadcasting through the internet. Were also looking at other stations taking our feed and transmitting to their listeners through the air waves as well. I'm looking at spending around $75,000 out of my pocket to get it going. I all ready have a racing show interested in going live for their radio show from here and perhaps 4 days a week live for local dirt track races and such as well.

I will still do the web hosting as I need that rack for the major processing of the radio show but still will be moving right along.

Like I said before, been there and done that.

Thanks for your remembrance of my comments in your other thread as well.

Well, as I said, you were right. And actually, it was your "premonitory comments" that partially drove us to dedicated over a VPS. I've actually seen a couple of times today with about 200 users/spiders total on the system where things actually "got slow" on our dedicated box. (Slow being relative as it was barely noticeable from a web page perspective, but the disks were certainly thrashing about from all the selects and inserts and the page render numbers were about double "normal".)

Anyway, I guess that was the point of my posting back here:

JAISP was right - VPS's aren't for everyone. However, that's not to say that a VPS can't be done right - it can. But, a VPS at a big name shop is hard for them to guarantee a certain level of service, especially disk i/o.

And as to recompiling the kernel on the fly: That's always impressive, but if you're going to be that geeked out, man, you've gotta go with vi over pico.

Anyway, as an OT side note, I've recommended you (JAISP) to a couple of different people lately. The radio thing sounds cool. Hopefully it works out well.

I have to sit here and think about how much $75k really is sometimes. I spec $70-$500k systems pretty much 2-3 times a week for my day job. It always amazes me that I can spec a system that costs more than my house without batting an eye any more. Corporate $ != individual $.

Thanks. Makes me feel good there.

This made me giggle

I use nano (pico clone) still dont like vi/joe :/

egads, I think any pico clone should be wiped off of all Linux distros

Well, it's basically pico without any of the other crap that comes in the suite ... I like it

enough said

'eh it's easier to use for me ... So there!

I like pico. It works when you need it.

As to the vi/pico thing:

I must say, I had a real turning point (years ago) when I was using my Motorola Timeport (think clamshell precursor to the Blackberry) typing a message, and the thought came into my head "Man, this would be soooo much easier if this thing had vi on it."

I knew I'd passed some threshold into true geekdom.

LOL, Got my laugh for the evening. Your becoming one of us now....