I'm changing hosts in a few weeks and I want to make sure my new host will be able to handle my site. I have a main site with photogalleries and also run a vbulletin with approximately 200 users online at all times. I use roughly 300 gigs per month bandwidth in total between the main site and the forums.

My current host says it's mainly the megabits of the connection that will determine the speed. I believe I can go up to 10mbps right now and my soon-to-be host ( The Planet ) tells me I will also have a 10mbps connection with 750 gigs bandwidth per month.

Someone else told me that the hard drive on the server computer makes all the difference.

Can anyone offer me some tips on what stats I should obtain from my current host to make sure the new one will be up to speed?

Thanks

The Network speed, server speed, amount of ram, the hard drive speed will make a difference and then just the website and how it is designed/scripted will make a difference.

Is your new host a shared host or is this a dedicated (I assume it is with the amount of bandwidth being used), but I'm just making sure.

yes it's dedicated. What is network speed? If it's dedicated isn't it stand-alone?

Not neccessarily. Dedicated means you alone are on the server(s) you own, they aren't shared by anyone else.

Dedicated servers can have all sorts of connections, however.

For a site like the one you described, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that at a few times a week, if not every day, you were actually capping out a 10mbps line, albeit for short periods of time.. and if you continue to grow, you will most certainly begin to do so. Remember, practically speaking, 10mbps = 1 megabyte/sec. Which is a lot, until you start talking 'photogalleries' and '100's of users online at a time'. ;)

Your current host is right, in your case. Your site is large, and you say that your 'main' site is a photogallery site.. that = more bandwidth than most sites. Both in terms of monthly usage, AND in terms of per/second throughput.

In your case, you know your monthly throughput. Do you know how much traffic your sites can generate a second during peak hours? It'd be worth finding out. It may be that you already top out your current 10mbps line during peak times.

If it is, and you are still growing/hoping to grow, you may want to find out your options involving a 100mbps capable line.. even just as research for a little ways down the road when it becomes more neccessary as your site continues to grow.

Thanks very much for that info. Do most hosting companies offer the service to upgrade the connection speed? 100mbps seems quite fast so would I be correct to assume only the larger companies woudl offer this sort of connection?

Actually thePlanet would switch the bandwidth speed up to 100mbps if they find you constantly hitting the limit of your 10mbps.

If people are constantly posting and sending up and viewing images, chances are you might be constain by the bandwidth but then again maybe not. With any scripts such as forums, the biggest hit would be on CPU and RAM when processing requests, storing and retrieving postings. Processes may take up to several seconds and if it gets to that stage, there will not be a need to use constant streaming of bandwidth.

Know that in theory if your bandwidth is constant, 10mbps would deliver up to a total of 3200gb or 3.2tb of bandwidth a month which in theory might be more than one system can handle. 100mbps would just give you 10x that capability.

Amount of memory is highly important, but efficient system configuration can really make or break you. Upping some of the limits in httpd.conf, and getting Apache away from inetd, can make a considerable difference. It's no good having a 10MBps connection if Apache is choking at 25 simultaneous connections.

If you're running a *NIX variant, there are a lot of pages on the WWW about file system and overall performance tuning. Well worth a read.

Upping some of the limits in httpd.conf, and getting Apache away from inetd

Are you able to tell me what this means?

Do you think a typical host would bother to identify problems if my site is slow or is it up to me? I woudl suspect they'd just want be to upgreade the ram and CPU to spend more cash.

Chances are the tuning will be up to you, some fully managed solution may assist you or do this for you but i think its highly unlikely.

Tuning is almost always going to be up to you, because in order to really tune a system, you need to know what it's going to be used for, and then use it and test it, and tune again... and so on.

In a "regular" Apache installation httpd is called by the "internet super daemon", inetd. My understanding is that inetd has issues under comparatively mild loads; my experience has tended to support this, but it's not empirical.

I run Apache under tcpserver and believe that I can see a significant increase in performance under some conditions. I run a lot of other stuff from tcpserver, as well, and am happy with the performance.

I know that's a heavily qualified answer; but I think the performance gain (or lack thereof) depends a lot on the server hardware and software, and the site or sites being served.

As far as upping the limits in httpd.conf... I guess a better thing to say would be "edit the settings in httpd.conf to sensible levels". I could tell you what I changed for my webmail server, but it'd be pretty meaningless for anyone else's applications. In some instances I actually reduced some of the limits, especially timeouts. Study the httpd.conf file, read some of the apache tuning docs out there, and start (carefully) tweaking.

Originally posted by Ankheg
In a "regular" Apache installation httpd is called by the "internet super daemon", inetd. My understanding is that inetd has issues under comparatively mild loads; my experience has tended to support this, but it's not empirical.


Maybe in 1995! The overhead of launching Apache through inetd to service each Web requests would be huge. This hasn't been a standard configuration since people were choosing between Apache and CERN.

Or is that what some host are still doing in VPSes? What a horrendous idea.

Kevin

Thanks for the replies guys. I don't really understand much since I'm nowhere near that level of knowlege. I'll try and read up on some stuff.