ok i'm still in "design" states of things but on average how many sites can you host on the following setup...
P3-500mhz
256mb ram
ide based hd(sorry scsi just too costly to start with)
freebsd for the OS

Well there are going to be a lot of things to factor in. I've seen 300 domains plus who knows how many sub's run off of one AMD 300mhz server with 256mb ram and ide drives. It ran fairly well but the load averages started to climb past 250.

PERSONALLY I wouldn't put more than 250 on the box. Because if you have 250 customers you should have enough money for another box. (Plenty enough money for another box @ that) But it also depends on how many cgi intensive clients you have. I would expect @ least 200-250 clients on that kinda box.



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Sincerely~
Daniel Pearson
UltraSpeed USA
http://www.ultraspeedusa.com
AIM: UltraSpeedUSA
ICQ: 7021831
Email: dpearson@ultraspeedusa.com
Phone: 1-205-785-1872

Dextor,
There is one very large factor which you have to look at. Yes on that type of server you could fit 250 websites.However one thing that will really bring down the amount of sites you can hold is CGI usage. From personal experence 250 websites would be the MAX and even then would slow the server down. however again it all depends on what your clients are doing. One server you may hold 300 clients, and another server you may only be able to hold 200 clients. The main thing is that you keep an eye on who is using what. Ensure that you don't host any Traffic exchange sites if you want to fit a lot of people on a server.

I will use an example now,
One of our servers is a 400mhz 512megs ram
We host around 180 sites on it with moderate CGI usage. That is the max we can put on that type of server, and are even thinking about switch some clients over to another one. So be sure to make a VERY good usage policy incase any problems arise and you need to say "good bye" to one of your clients.

Hope this helps




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[ Jason Berresford | Admin]
[ http://www.can-host.com ]
[ Admin@can-host.com ]
[ (905)765-8140 ]

Hrm,

That sounds quite strange as it is possible to host far many sites than what you are describing if the systems administrator understand what he/she is doing. A properly tuned web server with well-thought out modules and configuration should be able to handle far more than what you're describing while maintaining a load of far less than 1.00

Good luck.

Sincerely,


Vladislav Davidzon <davidzon@thinkhost.com> :-)
Senior Network Administrator - ThinkHost Web Hosting Services
http://www.thinkhost.com - honesty, reliability, trust.
We are the smart choice for all your web hosting needs! (TM)

I agree with thinkhost, but why get greedy. After 200 get another server. Dont push anything you dont have to, especially when it comes to money, downtime, clients happiness and so forth. Thats my suggestion

Jaguar,

Well I am more towards the idea of upgrading as far as possible and keeping all accounts on a limited number of boxes in order to make upgrades/maintenance/upkeeping simple.

Ultimately we're going to upgrade to a high-end RAID-5 Dell box with a few gigs of ram and quad processors, and then keep a second identical server mirrored to the first. That seems to me as the best solution to handling a growing number of accounts, while not having to worry about patching up 300 servers (like pair for example has to do) whenever a kernel patch or something comes out.

As long as load isn't a problem, and as long as there is a mirrored second box, and plenty of CPU power / RAID mirrors on the primary server, can you see any fall backs to using this idea?

To me it seems kinda silly to just keep adding separate machines, each one of which will need to talk to the control panel and each one of which we'll need to separately monitor and patch rather than buying a single very-redundant high-powered Dell server, even with a second identical one being mirrored every hour if need be.

Looking at Pair.com for example, it seems at least one or two of their 300 servers overloads once a day or more -- now if you can properly limit users' CGI's to make sure nothing spins out of control, and assure disk redundancy via RAID-5 or better, does anyone see any fallbacks to this other than the upfront costs?

I see lots of competitors throwing server after server after server at their clients, but to me that really seems a little redundant and having a single much-more-powerful server seems like a good idea. A properly configured quad or eight-processor machine should perform quite well, given that each user's CGI is limited.

Sincerely,


Vladislav Davidzon <davidzon@thinkhost.com> :-)
Senior Network Administrator - ThinkHost Web Hosting Services
http://www.thinkhost.com - honesty, reliability, trust.
We are the smart choice for all your web hosting needs! (TM)



[This message has been edited by thinkhost (edited 08-12-2000).]

Well in the UK is it not uncommon to find hosting companies with 800 sites per server, these are sites that have use of PHP, ASP and MySQL as well as CGI. The server specs are Dual 850PIII with 36Gb SCSI drives (which makes me wonder what happens if all of their clients want to use their 100Mb of space which is 80Gb).

We aim for 300 or less per server.

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Karl Austin
KDA Web Services