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  1. #1

    1500 sites on a server?

    Hello,

    This question is to the professionals out here who can make a calculated estimate.

    The second most powerful server liquidweb.com sell...

    "AMD Quad x 8 CORES 2.0Ghz Opteron 6128 - Total of 32 CORES! NEW - 32 cores @ 2.0GHZ each!"

    Lets assume we are a web designer and we have several thousand very basic html based websites with no databases, nothing dynamic, just static html and images... we also have a couple of thousand email inboxes. They are currently spread across 3 servers. Each site gets about 50 - 1000 visitors per day.

    There is 1500 sites in total.

    Could they comfortably fit on this server without causing a headache? What do you think?

    I have seen people ask "how many sites can i fit on a server?" which as we all know, is like asking "how long is a piece of string?" but i have tried to give enough information so you can at least give me a vague answer.

    There isn't a single mysql database on any of the sites on these servers.

  2. #2
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    There is a good chance that a Dual Xeon X5650 (12 cores 24 threads) would beat the server you mention above in a benchmark.

    Doesn't really answer your question specifically, but I am just letting you know more CPUs/Cores doesn't mean higher performance in all cases.
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  3. #3
    Ooh, also we are using CentOS and Cpanel and would like to keep it that way...

  4. #4
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    I think it's doable. Throw in a decent RAID10 array and setup a lightweight HTTP server like nginx and you should be good to go.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by XLHost View Post
    There is a good chance that a Dual Xeon X5650 (12 cores 24 threads) would beat the server you mention above in a benchmark.

    Doesn't really answer your question specifically, but I am just letting you know more CPUs/Cores doesn't mean higher performance in all cases.
    Really, wow there is a huge price difference there as well. Cheers for the info.

  6. #6
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    [Quad CPU] AMD Opteron 6128 17629
    [Dual CPU] Intel Xeon X5660 @ 2.80GHz 16539

    Source: http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

    (Disclaimer: I know CPU Benchmark is a rather disputed source but it still gives an OK assessment as to the better CPU. In this case there isn't much of a gain with the AMD that it makes sense to go with the Intel instead.)

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by lafuller View Post
    Lets assume we are a web designer and we have several thousand very basic html based websites with no databases, nothing dynamic, just static html and images... we also have a couple of thousand email inboxes. They are currently spread across 3 servers. Each site gets about 50 - 1000 visitors per day.

    There is 1500 sites in total.
    Ok, well lets say 500 visitors/day per site on average, * 1500 sites, you're at 750k visitors/day. Maybe each visitor does on average ~6 hits (since its static, they wont be browsing very far after all), you're talking about ~4.5 million hits/day.

    that brings you to ~52 hits/sec on the http side, maybe ~100 during the high hours.

    Given a vague description like this, I'd say chuck a decent SSD RAID1 in for /var/mail (or whatever your equivalent is for the mail queue), and for wherever Apache is logging, and that box would likely be very overkill.
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  8. #8
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    As they are only static websites that I would say it's doable, defiantly if you switched out for a Nginx setup instead of apache, may be even with Varnish to reduce some more load.
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  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by porcupine View Post
    Ok, well lets say 500 visitors/day per site on average, * 1500 sites, you're at 750k visitors/day. Maybe each visitor does on average ~6 hits (since its static, they wont be browsing very far after all), you're talking about ~4.5 million hits/day.

    that brings you to ~52 hits/sec on the http side, maybe ~100 during the high hours.

    Given a vague description like this, I'd say chuck a decent SSD RAID1 in for /var/mail (or whatever your equivalent is for the mail queue), and for wherever Apache is logging, and that box would likely be very overkill.
    If you're talking visitors, you need to think in terms of pageviews as well. You say "hits", but hits usually mean files / objects, like css, js, html. The number of pageviews per visitor and hits per pageview can vary greatly, but in my experience 3-20 pages / visitor and 5-20 hits per page view are reasonable estimates. Just call it 10 and 10 and it's probably not far off. That gives you 100 http requests per visitor, or 75 million a day for 750k visitors. Assuming the peak of the day sees double the "average" usage level, you're going to need to be able to serve 6 million hits / hour or 1700 hits / second.

    With SSD based storage and mostly static content, this is certainly possible. I've got a client on a 12 core server and SSD storage, they do over 2000 requests / second without breaking 2 cpu cores of usage. Admittedly, they've done a lot to optimize their site, but just to give you the idea that it is possible.
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  10. #10
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    For whatever, I won't be putting 1500 sites on a single server, disasters do happen.

    Just a point to think of.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vinayak_Sharma View Post
    For whatever, I won't be putting 1500 sites on a single server, disasters do happen.

    Just a point to think of.
    It's a very valid point, however ultimately it comes down to how much risk is he willing to take.

    The risk as with most things comes down to the cost, and how much profit is been generated per site to offset the infrastructure cost.
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  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    If you're talking visitors, you need to think in terms of pageviews as well. You say "hits", but hits usually mean files / objects, like css, js, html. The number of pageviews per visitor and hits per pageview can vary greatly, but in my experience 3-20 pages / visitor and 5-20 hits per page view are reasonable estimates. Just call it 10 and 10 and it's probably not far off. That gives you 100 http requests per visitor, or 75 million a day for 750k visitors. Assuming the peak of the day sees double the "average" usage level, you're going to need to be able to serve 6 million hits / hour or 1700 hits / second.
    Oh no doubt it'd be questionable without testing, but remember, if you have no dynamic content at all, chances are you probably dont have much CSS/JS/etc. Think simple sites that get ~50 hits a day without anything dynamic, and I think the sites that are a single image with some html, maybe a menu at the top comprised of a SSI, etc. Old school stuff

    That and I figured I could be light on that calc, since they said 50-1000, and I averaged at 500 =)
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  13. #13
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    if your talking about mostly static sites thats overkill on the cpu

  14. #14
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    The below assume a basic medium load html page with 250kB/visitor/day. No video stream, etc.

    There's an impedance mismatch for keeping both the serving and email on the same server in your case. For the hosting, I'd trade the cpu for RAM and use nginx's built-in memory caching.

    Your bottleneck is going to be the seek rate on the hard drive since for the most part, you're serving random files (across 1500 sites). There's really no way around it other than SSDs as others have suggested, or memory cache it. The later being the cheapest means but you still need some wiggle room for cache misses. Having an email server on that same server just exacerbates the problem.

    At the risk of sidelining this request, have you considered using a CDN instead of a beefy server? You would be practically paying the same, but it scales a bit easier.

  15. #15
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    cnd's are usually alot more then buying normal bandwith with a dedicated server i dont get where people get this idea that cdn's that cheap.



    Quote Originally Posted by tchen View Post
    The below assume a basic medium load html page with 250kB/visitor/day. No video stream, etc.

    There's an impedance mismatch for keeping both the serving and email on the same server in your case. For the hosting, I'd trade the cpu for RAM and use nginx's built-in memory caching.

    Your bottleneck is going to be the seek rate on the hard drive since for the most part, you're serving random files (across 1500 sites). There's really no way around it other than SSDs as others have suggested, or memory cache it. The later being the cheapest means but you still need some wiggle room for cache misses. Having an email server on that same server just exacerbates the problem.

    At the risk of sidelining this request, have you considered using a CDN instead of a beefy server? You would be practically paying the same, but it scales a bit easier.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberhouse View Post
    cnd's are usually alot more then buying normal bandwith with a dedicated server i dont get where people get this idea that cdn's that cheap.
    CDNs aren't cheap, but neither is the OPs quad core which has 5TB out running at about $500. You can get ok (not stellar) CDNs at about $100/TB blocks.

    So, for the OP who's running completely static websites and will likely be disk bound, suggesting a CDN isn't that far off the bend. Assuming we're not talking about a hosting situation where his hosting clients need shell access or can muck about themselves, I personally would have gone with the CDN due to its advantages of low-maintenance, scalability, and robustness.

  17. #17
    If you're sticking with liquidweb I'd say go for this one http://www.liquidweb.com/cart/conten...DGainstown5506 with 12GB RAM and an extra HDD for RAID 1. You would be fine with the a single core, but it looks like your budget would stretch to this so why not.

    Use nginx as the web server if you can and the majority of the RAM will be free and available for file caching. I think pretty much all of the heavily hit stuff will fit in the RAM This means the hard disks will hardly have to do anything so a SSD would be pointless.
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  18. #18
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    The average 8 core server can handle somewhere around 500 normal sites. If you're just hosting static content, then yes that cpu can can handle 1.5k sites if managed properly. You will definitely need a raid setup though.

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