Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : [ADVICE NEEDED] Atom server is incapable?

[AstroNyu]

I have a server with 100TB which is a good server (although some user reported my site as being slow) but it is such an overkill as I sold most of my sites already. So, intead of paying $200+ per month for a server which I am not fully utilized, I decided to migrate to Interserver's cheaper solution, the Dual Atom server which cost me $64 per month including cpanel so I'm a happy man.

BUT, just after the migration (thanks to Interserver's John helped me with migration plus tweaking up the server for free) the server can't keep up with my site and keep on crashing due to high load from mySQL. The site which gave me this problem is share2many.com which is weird because on my old server with 100TB, I've never got this problem.

When asked one of the forumer here, I was been advised to change my hardware as according to him Atom server is not meant to host that kind of site.

So, please, most respected gurus here, please give me your opinion. Is it true Atom server is not capable of handling a site like mine? Any idea where I could find a server that include cpanel which is less than $100? I have 10 sites more or less but all of them are having very low traffic.

Hope some of you can give me insight of what should I do.

ps* Not sure Interserver has any money back guarantee as I did try to look for it but they only have guarantee for shared hosting.

[JamieJ]

An Atom shouldn't have any problem with running that site. You may just need to optimize your Apache and MySQL for better performance.

[ThePrimeHost]

Originally Posted by HostGladiator

An Atom shouldn't have any problem with running that site. You may just need to optimize your Apache and MySQL for better performance.

Bingo. If you're unsure of how to do this yourself you might want to hire a management company to optimize / tune Apache & MySQL as HostGladiator said.

[Bernardoo]

You can also get one dedicated server better then atom for more or less 100$

Look on the offer section for for it, look for offers in Europe you will most likely find them cheaper then USA offers.

[FastServ]

If you have 4Gb RAM, you should be able to optimize around your issues. I would recommend at least a core2duo or switching to NGINX for a busy sharing site though.

[AstroNyu]

Thanks. I along with my DC tweak the my.cnf a little bit to reduce the load. And he disable webalizer along with some other things. Loads now maintain below 2. Gonna monitor the server for couple more days and see if everything is ok.

I have no problem going with server management company, in fact I used to use PSM since 2005 till last year. If I have problems with Apache, I could use nginx to ease it up but haven't got experience with easing mysql load though.

Thanks for the input guys. Appreciate it a lot.

[AstroNyu]

I still have frequent load spike floating around 2-4.
Currently I have 2GB of RAM but what is the guarantee that if I add another 2GB total of 4GB (max) that my problem will be lessen if not solved?

[funkywizard]

Originally Posted by ElevatedServers

I have a server with 100TB which is a good server (although some user reported my site as being slow) but it is such an overkill as I sold most of my sites already. So, intead of paying $200+ per month for a server which I am not fully utilized, I decided to migrate to Interserver's cheaper solution, the Dual Atom server which cost me $64 per month including cpanel so I'm a happy man.

BUT, just after the migration (thanks to Interserver's John helped me with migration plus tweaking up the server for free) the server can't keep up with my site and keep on crashing due to high load from mySQL. The site which gave me this problem is share2many.com which is weird because on my old server with 100TB, I've never got this problem.

When asked one of the forumer here, I was been advised to change my hardware as according to him Atom server is not meant to host that kind of site.

So, please, most respected gurus here, please give me your opinion. Is it true Atom server is not capable of handling a site like mine? Any idea where I could find a server that include cpanel which is less than $100? I have 10 sites more or less but all of them are having very low traffic.

Hope some of you can give me insight of what should I do.

ps* Not sure Interserver has any money back guarantee as I did try to look for it but they only have guarantee for shared hosting.

Pretty sure the $200 / mo 100tb server is a xeon 3220, which benchmarks around 3000 on cpubenchmark.net. A dual core atom benchmarks around 600, so your old server was about 5x as fast. Unless you were able to have 90% idle cpu on your last server, the atom isn't going to be fast enough. An i3 cpu should also bench around 3000, or a pentium D could bench around twice as much as the atom you've got.

[tim2718281]

Originally Posted by ElevatedServers

I have a server with 100TB which is a good server (although some user reported my site as being slow) but it is such an overkill as I sold most of my sites already. So, intead of paying $200+ per month for a server which I am not fully utilized, I decided to migrate to Interserver's cheaper solution, the Dual Atom server which cost me $64 per month including cpanel so I'm a happy man.

BUT, just after the migration (thanks to Interserver's John helped me with migration plus tweaking up the server for free) the server can't keep up with my site and keep on crashing due to high load from mySQL. The site which gave me this problem is share2many.com which is weird because on my old server with 100TB, I've never got this problem.

The old server presumably had 8GB RAM, the new server 1GB. If the new server is crashing, then maybe the Web and SQL servers are not configured correctly, allowing them to request more memory than is available.

[SamBarrow]

People don't realize that just because the Atoms are newer, it doesn't mean they are fast. The real value in an Atom is the very low power usage.
Looking at the benchmarks, their performance is about equivalent to a mid-range Pentium 4. My old opteron (2xx series) servers that I pick up on ebay for $200 outperform atoms by about 5x.

[funkywizard]

Originally Posted by tim2718281

The old server presumably had 8GB RAM, the new server 1GB. If the new server is crashing, then maybe the Web and SQL servers are not configured correctly, allowing them to request more memory than is available.

Would agree here as well. There are ways to get sites to run well in less ram (say, 2gb or so), but the stock installation of apache is basically designed to waste ram, which will crash your server under any moderate load.

[DWS2006]

Better optimization could make a world of difference. It is possible that you might be able to find a bigger server for $64 a month if you can get by with DirectAdmin instead of cPanel. A celeron dual core e3000 or pentium dual core e2000 would offer substantially better performance but can be had cheaply.

[Softsys Hosting]

Well, ATOM isn't a bad processor. I've seen few of our customers using D525 / 4G RAM and it has performed pretty decently. As stated above, you will need to consider optimizing the services to match available memory/resources. If it still doesn't help, upgrading hardware should be the next step.