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Thread: Am I being overly cautious?
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03-02-2008, 11:51 PM #1Junior Guru
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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
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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03-21-2008, 08:31 PM #2Junior Guru
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Sorry for the bump, but wondering if anyone had any advice for me.
ThanksBroncosForums - Broncos message board and live news feed
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03-21-2008, 08:39 PM #3WebHosting Master
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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.
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03-21-2008, 08:46 PM #4Junior Guru
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03-21-2008, 10:00 PM #5Web Hosting Master
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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).
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03-21-2008, 10:15 PM #6WebHosting Master
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03-21-2008, 10:16 PM #7Junior Guru
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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.BroncosForums - Broncos message board and live news feed
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03-21-2008, 10:21 PM #8WebHosting Master
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03-21-2008, 10:37 PM #9Junior Guru
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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?BroncosForums - Broncos message board and live news feed
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03-21-2008, 11:13 PM #10Web Hosting Master
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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?
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.
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
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03-21-2008, 11:38 PM #11Junior Guru
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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?BroncosForums - Broncos message board and live news feed
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03-22-2008, 12:34 AM #12WebHosting Master
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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.
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03-22-2008, 12:40 AM #13Junior Guru
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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?BroncosForums - Broncos message board and live news feed
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03-22-2008, 07:34 PM #14Web Hosting Master
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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.
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03-23-2008, 05:42 PM #15Newbie
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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.
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03-23-2008, 05:52 PM #16Junior Guru
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