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  1. #1
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    Oct 2007
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    Am I being overly cautious?

    Ok, I have a VPS with 1152MB SLM Ram, and it is housed on an 8 core zone.net VPS. With the exception of a couple unexplained MySQL crashes, it runs like a champ.

    My main site, and currently the only one running on the Zone vps is a vBulletin forum (see my sig).

    The forum these days mostly stays between 40-80 members online at a time, based on vBulletins 'active users' display. I also use apachetop to try and get a more accurate view of the people hitting Apache (the vBulletin users are based on a 30 minute timeout).

    During all but a few hours over night (early AM), I range between 20-40 people connected at a time. I am basing this on having apachetop looking at the last 180 seconds of log activity. So, this means that in any 180 second period, there are 20-40 people that have accessed apache and the actual requests made against the server will range from 1,000-2,500 during that 180 second period.

    Google analytics shows that I get 20-25,000 page views a day, and 400-500 unique visitors making 1,000-1,300 visits per day.

    As I write this, my VPS is using 260MB of RAM according to top, and the most I ever see it using is around 500MB (the RAM usage seems to have dropped since upgrading WHM, Apache to 2.2.8 and PHP to the latest release that WHM supports unless it creeps back up to the 500mb range over time).

    Ok, with all that out of the way, if you made it this far, I had purchased a second VPS to use as a backup in case the primary had severe downtime, but primarily to offload a handful of smaller sites with fairly limited hits (20-200 visits a day), and some just personal sites used for email.

    One of them does image hosting for me and a dozen or so others for images in forum signatures.

    I'm beginning to think it was being overly cautious to create a new VPS to offload these low traffic sites, which

    In Feb, the cpanel account on the second/backup VPS that hosts the graphics had these stats:

    Code:
    ............. Avg  Max  
     
    Hits per Hour 282 3659 
    Hits per Day 6788 21792 
    Files per Day 6404 21485 
    Pages per Day 365 1142 
    Visits per Day 87 131 
    KBytes per Day 233365 765265
    Other than the above graphic serving, I don't really have any other sites (cPanel accounts) that are getting much traffic at all. Two of them might get 100-200 each (one Wordpress and one Mambo site), and the rest is personal email accounts.

    So, am I crazy to have a second VPS for these other sites, when my primary is sitting with 700MB+ free RAM day in and day out?

    The VPS that houses these other sites has 588MB SLM RAM and top usually shows it with around 440MB used and 148MB free and typically the server loads are sub .1.

    Thanks in advance for any thoughts/advice.
    Last edited by tnedator; 03-02-2008 at 11:57 PM.
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  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
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    Sorry for the bump, but wondering if anyone had any advice for me.

    Thanks
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  3. #3
    Join Date
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    Try integrating them back.
    If the server does not exceed 80-90% resource usage, it's fine.

    I usually upgrade when there's only 10-20% resources to spare.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by tsj5j View Post
    Try integrating them back.
    If the server does not exceed 80-90% resource usage, it's fine.

    I usually upgrade when there's only 10-20% resources to spare.
    Thanks. You look at resources in a blended sense? Meaning, 10-20% free RAM, or 10-20% free disk space?
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Location
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    It does look like you have plenty of overhead to run the smaller sites on your zone.net account. Having said that it's never a bad idea to not have all your eggs in one basket even if it is a really good zone.net basket. I myself am in the process of setting up a vps mirror in case of downtime (even the best have some downtime).

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by tnedator View Post
    Thanks. You look at resources in a blended sense? Meaning, 10-20% free RAM, or 10-20% free disk space?
    In a sense, yes.

    Meaning, if I have only 10-20% free RAM (and I can't cut back by optimization, and it isn't due to caching), I'll add a RAM chip in.
    Not enough disk space, add a HDD.

  7. #7
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    Oct 2007
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nnyan View Post
    It does look like you have plenty of overhead to run the smaller sites on your zone.net account. Having said that it's never a bad idea to not have all your eggs in one basket even if it is a really good zone.net basket. I myself am in the process of setting up a vps mirror in case of downtime (even the best have some downtime).
    yes, that's part of what I have been wrestling with. Part is that I want the vBulletin site to run as quick as possible, but at the same time I hate paying for a second barely used VPS.

    On the other hand, one of the initial motivations for the second VPS was to store a current backup (I stage my latest backup on the second VPS then download it via a scheduled FTP job) of the vBulletin site and be ready in case of a failure on my main Zone VPS.
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  8. #8
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    Dec 2006
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nnyan View Post
    It does look like you have plenty of overhead to run the smaller sites on your zone.net account. Having said that it's never a bad idea to not have all your eggs in one basket even if it is a really good zone.net basket. I myself am in the process of setting up a vps mirror in case of downtime (even the best have some downtime).
    Agreed.

    But his current setup is not redundant (not really).
    He is hosting different websites on each of the servers.

    To achieve better use of the second VPS, he should mirror everything.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by tsj5j View Post
    Agreed.

    But his current setup is not redundant (not really).
    He is hosting different websites on each of the servers.

    To achieve better use of the second VPS, he should mirror everything.
    Correct, it is not fully redundant now. I copy cpanel backup packages from my main (zone) VPS to the second VPS daily, along with sql dumps in between, but have not been copying backups of the other site in the other direction.

    If I were to move them all to the main VPS and went for a pure backup solution, should I keep using a Cpanel package/backup approach, or something like Rsync to create a mirror on the second VPS?
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  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by tnedator View Post
    Ok, I have a VPS with 1152MB SLM Ram, and it is housed on an 8 core zone.net VPS. With the exception of a couple unexplained MySQL crashes, it runs like a champ.

    My main site, and currently the only one running on the Zone vps is a vBulletin forum (see my sig).
    Glad to hear everything has been running well for you so far.

    So, am I crazy to have a second VPS for these other sites, when my primary is sitting with 700MB+ free RAM day in and day out?
    No, your not crazy, your just very cautious with your data and that's the best way you can be for your peace of mind and integrity of your valuable data. Having a backup server with another provider is a good idea. However, it sounds like your main server is underutilized. I would take the communities advice and try to re-integrate the sites onto your main server and just use the other server as a hot-spare cPanel server.

    Quote Originally Posted by tnedator View Post
    Correct, it is not fully redundant now. I copy cpanel backup packages from my main (zone) VPS to the second VPS daily, along with sql dumps in between, but have not been copying backups of the other site in the other direction.
    If your hosting live sites on the backup server than copying cPanel backups just one-way is not the best solution. You might want to look into having the same process run in reverse so the sites that are live on the backup server get their backup files pushed to your main server. That way both servers have redundant backup copies of each others sites.

    Quote Originally Posted by tnedator View Post
    If I were to move them all to the main VPS and went for a pure backup solution, should I keep using a Cpanel package/backup approach, or something like Rsync to create a mirror on the second VPS?
    There's no harm in doing that either, and you could just keep doing the one-way backups safely since all the live sites are hosted on one server. Rather than use rsync I would suggest you just look into automating the backup and restore functions of cPanel. It's basically just two commands, /scripts/pkgacct <username> and /scripts/restoreacct <username>. Surround those commands with a few ssh and scp commands and you have a very nice simple hot-spare cPanel system.

    On a similar note, you might want to check out this script: http://clonepanel.com/

    It's by a fellow WHT user, foobic and it might do what you need to accomplish easily.
    Last edited by seankoons; 03-21-2008 at 11:16 PM. Reason: clonepanel URL addition

  11. #11
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    Oct 2007
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    Sean, thanks as always for good advice.

    I have automated the cpanel backups and SCP and have them running via cron jobs.

    Based on what I have read here, I think I will move those smaller sites back over to my main VPS, then add them to my cpanel package/scp script and transfer them to the backup server via cron jobs.

    I'll checkout the clonepanel though, to see what it offers.

    What are the advantages/disadvantages of Rsync versus cpanel package backups?
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  12. #12
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    I prefer RSYNC's incremental backups, where it only backups files that have changed, and the compression whilst the files are being backed up.

    It saves a nice amount of bandwidth.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by tsj5j View Post
    I prefer RSYNC's incremental backups, where it only backups files that have changed, and the compression whilst the files are being backed up.

    It saves a nice amount of bandwidth.
    I've tried to research it a few times, but am not completely clear how Rsync works with VPS's and Cpanel.

    Is there a good resource to figure out how to Rsync the two VPS's?

    I would assume I wouldn't want to rsync system files between the two VPS's, but instead the Cpanel accounts, MySQL, etc. Is this correct?
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  14. #14
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
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    You can also do some optimization on all your sites like moving rewrites in .htaccess over to httpd.conf, Nofollow pages like Register, Calendar, Search etc to keep the bots away, run your backup crons in quiet time, try caching your vb templates, run all your boards JS files through JsMin, move your attachments (avatars etc) to the filesystem to reduce MySql etc.

    With 1152MB you should be fine, i'm running similar traffic/scripts on 768MB.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by tnedator View Post
    yes, that's part of what I have been wrestling with. Part is that I want the vBulletin site to run as quick as possible, but at the same time I hate paying for a second barely used VPS.

    On the other hand, one of the initial motivations for the second VPS was to store a current backup (I stage my latest backup on the second VPS then download it via a scheduled FTP job) of the vBulletin site and be ready in case of a failure on my main Zone VPS.
    how has the performance been since you put all of your sites on the zone vps? i signed up with them a little while ago on the vm100 package and so far i have no complaints. it's only been a few days so i can't yet say yay or nay just yet but in comparison to the economoy virtual dedi plan i had with godaddy my little vm100 is like a racehorse versus a donkey.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by timocampo View Post
    how has the performance been since you put all of your sites on the zone vps? i signed up with them a little while ago on the vm100 package and so far i have no complaints. it's only been a few days so i can't yet say yay or nay just yet but in comparison to the economoy virtual dedi plan i had with godaddy my little vm100 is like a racehorse versus a donkey.
    I haven't combined them yet. Currently, it is only my vBulletin site on the Zone VPS and it runs very well.
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