Hi folks,
I hope you can help me with some advice.
I run (and pay for the hosting of) several websites of popular UK magazines such as What Video, What Cellphone, What Camcorder, Total DVD, What Home Cinema, Digital Photography Buyer & User etc. These sites are currently on a Demon RAQ box which I took several years ago when Demon were starting their RAQ dedicated server solutions.
I negotiated a significant discount in exchange for displaying a 'Powered by Demon' logo and link at the bottom of the sites.
The great thing about the box is that the data transfer is unmetered. We actually serve over 10 Gig of data per day !! (reviews and articles containing large images or pdfs).
Much of the content is dynamically created using MySQL and PHP.
Unfortunately our box is now struggling under the weight of popularity of our sites and I'm getting several server load errors per day. One site alone just broke our record at nearly 70,000 unique visitors in one week.
So I'm looking around for a solution to the problem.
A managed dedicated server is the first option.
With the active promotion of the sites and the planned addition of many more, we need to have a long-term capacity for maybe 100 Gig data transfer a day. With the processor power, memory and very fast (SCSI?) I/O to support such traffic.
A RAQ 550 box may not be powerful enough?
An alternative solution would be to have one box which serves the images and pdfs, and one box which does the database crunching and everything else.
Either way I'm getting quotes in the region of £700 a month from Demon which is 5 times more than I'm paying right now.
Other hosts are simply not interested in offering a bespoke solution.
We really need a host who is reliable, competitive, experienced but hungry enough to give us a great discount in exchange for the 'powered by' logo and link at the foot of every page.
Since a lot of the pages are dynamic and most of our visitors are in the UK, should we consider a US host (which is likely to be more competitively priced?) Or should we stick to a local UK company?
Please help as our server is painfully slow and I need to find an alternative quite fast.
Many thanks for your input.

spinball,

the raq box is definitely not powerful enough. in my opinion, a 2.6ghz p4 with ide drives would be sufficient for now with a bit of breathing room, as your traffic does not seem to be *that* heavy. a US host would be able to offer you a solution like that for a reasonably competitive price.

if you would like to get a solution now that will allow you to expand to the levels you outlined (ie 100gb/day), a dual xeon box with scsi and a specialized daemon for serving static content (images, pdfs etc) would be ideal. with that said, a machine like that with a 3000gb/mo transfer allotment will, most likely, not be available with a quality provider at 700 quid, even in the US. i have doubts that demon would quote you that kind of pricing.

i do suggest you go with a US-based provider to get lower rates, but make sure the connectivity to the UK is good - you will most likely want it to be a datacenter on the east coast.

a few providers here specialize in bespoke (or, as we like to call them on this side of the pond, 'custom') solutions. replies are not allowed in this section, as it is strictly non-commercial. contacting companies that you are specifically interested in would be your best bet.

paul

You might want to try big players in the managed hosting business like servint.com and rackspace. That is if you don't mind hosting on US based servers, though Rackspace does have a UK based presence.

You might also try leaseweb.nl. They do offer budget European dedicated servers out of Redbus Amsterdam and are probably big enough to be willing to negotiate with you.

Rackshack might also be willing to talk, but they offer unmanaged servers.

I'd also suggest to start out with a reasonably powerfull single server and see how far it takes you, rather that go straight for 2 servers. If one server doesn't hack it, adding a second shouldn't be that difficult later on. Maybe a single high end P4 processor with hyperthreading, to keep the price down, rather that dual xeons, just to keep the price down a bit.

hyperthreading on a p4 does very little for OLTP performance, getting one would be a waste of money. i would agree that getting a lower spec box, as i had suggested, and adding another one either as a db server or another node would be the best solution, until you can assess your needs better.

paul

If your traffic is UK based and your business is UK based, then you want you sites/servers UK based if possible - less hops, less lag, less problems - when TAT14 had "issues" for the best part of 2 weeks, sites outside the UK were inaccessible to most UK dial up and ADSL users.

>I run (and pay for the hosting of) several websites ...

Do the magazines contribute to the running costs of the server(s) ?

>I negotiated a significant discount in exchange for displaying a 'Powered by

well done ! back then Demon (ScotTelecom now Thus) weren't too keen on negotiation

>We actually serve over 10 Gig of data per day !!

= appx 1Mb/s sustained - do they give you graphs so we can see the throughput (mrtg 95%ile woudl be helpful)

>we need to have a long-term capacity for maybe 100 Gig data transfer a day.

the jump from 10 to 40 is an enormous growth in vistors and traffic, getting up to 100 would be very impressive ...

one solution you *may* not have looked at is getting more than 1 server to do the job - splitting the very heavy sites onto their own dedicated box, perhaps even getting 10Mb/s to a switch and running 'n' servers 1 per site - this woudl also give you some redundancy in terms of a box fails, you can restore your backup to another and add the IP and off you go again.

>A RAQ 550 box may not be powerful enough?

not for the sustained levels you're looking at, not 1 on it's own for sure. We've been using RaQs for a number of years, and they're very good at what they're for, but what you need is a custom solution - probably xeon2.4, a few gig of ram etc

and definately 2 servers with half the sites on each at a minimum, so as to have that failover possibility...

>one box which serves the images and pdfs, and one box which does the database crunching and everything else.

that woudl spread the load and ekeep you going for now ...

>Either way I'm getting quotes in the region of £700 a month

what are they offering for that price. Thus are *not* the most competitive dedicated server suppliers in London ...

>We really need a host who is reliable, competitive, experienced but hungry enough to give us a great discount in exchange for the 'powered by' logo and link at the foot of every page.

you'd need to ask in the offers forum as hosts are not allowed to "sell" in this one ...

>most of our visitors are in the UK, should we consider a US host (which is likely to be more competitively priced?) Or should we stick to a local UK company?

My own (poss biased opinion) is that to make a service effective you should place it near the users of that service. Just as we who are hosts *generally* pick a DC for our servers taking the hardware to the badwidth "hub" rather than piping the bandwidth out to the office and hosting from there. Similarly picking a colo/dedi provider with good links to other ISPs, peering with the users connectivity suppliers etc will make it a better experience for them - If all your visitors use newnet adsl to view the site, then it make lots of sense to pick a provider who uses newnet bandwidth of peers with newnet - less hops, quicker site viewing.

Hosting stateside will at the min add 65ms onto everything as thats the retuirn speed of light down the fibre between the UK and US, picking the wrong coast, poorly connected datacentre or badly setup network / over sold service will add a lot more.

If *price* is the overriding factor, then yes US will be cheaper, as transit is a bit cheaper stateside and often heavily oversold.
Avoid cogent based as noticable problems often occur backhauling the data to the UK

HTH

Greetings:

I would recommend utilizing a separate machine for the mySQL activity.

If your mail server load is high, you may also want to put that on a separate machine.

I would recommend looking at dual processors if you can afford it; and also utilzing RAID 1+0 which gives you redundance on the hard drives.

If you can go RAID 5 on the mysql server, all the better.

Thank you.

My suggestions would be:

1. Forget Raqs, their days are over. You can get much better specified Linux servers at good prices.

2. If the mags are UK mags then I would recommend UK-based servers in your case as I think site performance is going to be important.

3. Rather than spend a lot on one fairly high-spec server I'd go with moderate spec servers (eg, P4s with IDE drives) and aim to have at least two, spreading the sites over the servers.

4. It may eventually be worth splitting out database, image and PDF serving to different servers, but at the moment I think this will be too much of a leap in complexity and budget for you, and I don't think your requirements justify this at the moment (from your description).

5. Do think carefully about what you need in terms of "managed" services. No two companies define "managed" the same, so make sure you get what you need.

You will find a number of UK suppliers on WHT and amongst them are some very good companies who will do you a good deal and look after you very well. The bigger companies will likely be more expensive, less helpful/flexible.

I agree with dynamicnet, adding a separate MySQL server will greatly decrease the loads on your web boxes. You might even be able to extend your stay in your current situation.

Just add a 2nd server to handle your mysql databases for all of your sites, and the saved cpu cycles on your web box can go to supporting more visitors.