Hello there,

I just wondered what you guys views as an appropriate amount of accounts on 1 box. - I don't want to host my clients accounts on an overcrowded box with degrading performance. I'm sure that there are several factors to be considered. Hoping for some input.

John

Very good question...
It has been asked numerous times..
But I think it all depends on what kind of sites you are hosting, do you have small little resume sites or big corperate ones? I thik you really need to think about your market and then see what is a standard for that market.. Max I would ever go for is 200-250

my 0.02

Chris

Originally posted by creid
my 0.02

Oh.. you mean your server's load average is 0.02 ? ;)
Nice. What are you running on it? A photograph of yourself? :D

No offence dude. Just joking around. :)

well... you should keep loading the box until it starts crying... hard disk reaches the max out limit.. you start running out of ram... load sky rockets... these all indicate your server is over loaded and time to get a new one...


there is no standard answer to your question...

Isn't 200-250 low? I've heard about 1000-1500 per box.

[B]well... you should keep loading the box until it starts crying... hard disk reaches the max out limit.. you start running out of ram... load sky rockets... these all indicate your server is over loaded and time to get a new one... [B]

This is exactly what I would like to avoid - using clients as test rabbits ;) - Well, it off course depends on many things when this point is reached - is the box filled with many clients that are heavy users of bandwidth - does it have 1 or 2 CPU's etc. - So I now there's no standard answer, but thought that someone maybe would share from their experience whether they have a max limit policy and how high it is set. 200-250 would also be few accounts for a box with a mega harddisk etc. No standard answer but thought that someone might have some experience reaching the above level.

John

I love that answer...until it cries for mercy ;-)

You could try to add a few accounts at a time to see if it increases the load when you hit 200 or so. When you notice that sites are slowing down or you have more difficulties keeping the box alive, get another, rince and repeat.

Remember too...nothing is set in stone, you can always rebalance (move clients to your 2nd box), and allow for normal attrition (bankruptcies, deaths, other tragedies that would force people to leave you :stickout )

Cheers,
B

I agree with everyone above so far.

It does take a little trial error, and some sampling of the type/size/activity of the sites you host. Server specs are a big factor, but so is the quality of your network/switch, connectivity & NIC.

You'll also want to factor in the amount of dependency you want to put on one box. If you're hosting 1000 domains and 950 of them are on the same box -- what happens when a major component on that box fails and you have no fallback server infrastructure in place? Instead of potentially losing uptime for 150-300 domains, you're not providing service to 95% of your client base -- which is definitely enough to bury your company. :dgrin:

Even worse than a hardware failure (which could be swapped in 5 mins to an hour) is a disk accident or corruption error which scrambles your DNS, apache config or mail tables. Granted most hosts are going to have a backup, but try getting something done with 95% of your customer base barking at you! :D

If you use Cobalt RAQ4's, I wouldn't recommend putting more than 150 or so small/mid range sites.

We have some Dual PIII-1ghz, 2GB RAM, 160GB RAID boxes that are easily capable of hosting 300+ sites.

If you own or lease cabinets in a data center (which in my opinion is the way to go) and use your own hardware (servers/switches) -- I highly recommend being moderate when loading the machines. You never know when you might need to use the extra capacity of one of the machines (especially if you don't have spare servers on standby). The $1500 you spend on that next server might just save your company's proverbial ass. :cool:

If you get a 40GB hard disk and 300GB/month traffic for a box, when should it start crying?

Ideally it should start crying when you are reaching your limits.

But that does not happen. It can cry anytime based on what kind of activity goes on. And the most important activity is disk I/O.

Right now we are averaging about 40 per box. Loads on the servers hover around 0.1 - 0.5 all day. Our most "loaded" box has 44 accounts on it, including a couple busy PHPBB sites, and its our Primary Nameserver. Its load never stays over 0.5 for more than a second or two. (Dual CPU's makes a difference I think).

I'd rather "under-load" my servers, to keep them from performing poorly, and becoming so stressed under load that they start flaking and crashing on me.

Its cheaper to buy another server and set it up to run well than it is to spend hours fixing a broken or overloaded one. Not to mention that it may be costing us customers.

Take care,

Brian

Thanks a lot for all the input :) - I have saved this page for future reference.

John

It's always good to use SCSI based disk systems rather than IDE for high traffic web sites. SCSI doesn't put load on a CPU and tends to be more reliable as well ;=) I am just wondering guys running heavy traffic sites (adult pics, video) and serving it from cheap IDEs:) But you never know..

Maybe this should be a new thread, but I'm wondering if pretty much everyone uses standalone boxes for collections of customers. For example, customers 1-100 are on box A, which runs apache and mysql, customers 101-200 are on box B which runs apache and mysql, etc?

An alternative that we find works for us is a big bad SCSI fileserver with multiple load-balanced cheap apache boxes serving requests. The upside is only one set of software to maintain, one Apache (nfs mounted) to upgrade. This make server management way simpler for us. The downside is of course if the fileserver goes down, everybody's down.

Thoughts?

Originally posted by magnafix

Thoughts?

Your approach is really practical. MySQL can be tuned and OS can be tuned for specific task: Database Server. Plus more specific hardware, like SCSI. One such DB server can serve many other Apache/Qmail boxes.

But you need to have at least 2 boxes to start with :)

In fact, you can put up another MySQL server as slave for redundancy. But then you need 3 boxes to start with :)

I noticed u didn't post server specs! Saying any one number is nearly impossible without knowing specs, and even then can be considerably difficult, I mean are you hosting the "Turnberry Family Website" or are you hosting the next Yahoo!?

Even then a 866Mhz System with 128 megs of ram obviously will have few clients then a duel P3 1Ghz with 2 gigs of ram.

I know you said you didn't want to play trial and error with your clients but that's exactly what you have to do. It's all part of the game :D.

People you can't imagine how many clients you can host on a webserver. Because that depends on the hardware and the sites hosted on them and how they grow etc. etc.