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  1. #1

    Massive Server Needs?

    Hey all,

    I'm in a bit of a quandry right now. I just started a new job, and I found out that they are just finishing up a new website for their business.

    Last year, their novice like site served up 1.6 million hits per month with almost zero ranking from Google. This year, the new site is completely indexable and we are expecting alot more traffic.

    Lasty year's numbers suggest that our newly revised e-commerce site (not live at this time) will require roughly 3 terabytes of transfer during our peak season (expecting 3 million hits per month).

    I'm trying to figure out what our best options for service are, who would be best to go through...and/or what type of service/server I should be looking for.

    Thanks!
    John

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
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    Seattle, WA
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    541
    some sort of load balanced solution should be good for this operation. check out www.dinix.com and www.rackspace.com. Unless you want to buy and colocate your servers.

  3. #3
    Yeah, you could simply set up DNS round robin and have 3-4 boxes set up in a server farm. Depending on your needs this could be the most cost effective way to set up a load balancer.
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2003
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    2,172
    Round Robins are not that good. I'd reccomend either www.rackspace.com or www.theplanet.com. I'd reccomend a full load balanced solution with load balancing hardware. This may cost a bit however a site serving up that much im sure is making plenty to pay for it

  5. #5
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Philadelphia
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    970
    Sounds like you have a decent site in the works

    With a site like this, providing you have the finacial backing to purchase your hardware up front and the technical expertise to manage said hardware your best bet would be to colocate.

    If you colo you have the maximum flexibility possible, you can use the exact hardware you want to with th exact config you require.

    3 million hits alone, is not a great deal but if your after a HA solution you're probably going to want to get a hardware based load balancer/failover device such as the cisco CSM switches http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/...etw/index.html

    2-3 front end web servers (single CPU boxes should be able to do the job) and 2 backend DB boxes (dual Xeons, SCSI drives in RAID config, lots of RAM and dual power supplies)

    Obviously if you dont want to front the cash for such a solution you can talk to the managed solutions providers like everyone else suggested.
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    Grand Canyon State
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    591
    3 million hits and 3 TB of transfer. Sure that isn't 3 million page views? I had 8.6 million hits on my main site last month and had 76 GB of transfer.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
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    Seattle, WA
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    I would take a hard look at Dinix and RackSpace. If you find something that either will provide aproch the other for their price on the same thing

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Posts
    385
    you might look into TP's Dual Xeon RAID 5 SCSI boxes for the DB (get 2 like eboundry suggested and do a master-master replication with using only one of them for writes) and get 3 or 4 of their dual xeon scsi boxes, comes out to $2k/mo and should deliver 150M pvs/mo if your application is written well...
    dynamic DNS actually can work very well with TTL=300, using dyndns.org to deliver very constant/equal traffic to all webslaves.

  9. #9
    Thank you for all of the help everyone. I've contacted every provider you all have mentioned, in an effort to flesh out which one is best for our needs.

    I'll be sure to post my reviews of each interaction once we make a decision.

    Thanks!

  10. #10
    you might look into TP's Dual Xeon RAID 5 SCSI boxes for the DB (get 2 like eboundry suggested and do a master-master replication with using only one of them for writes) and get 3 or 4 of their dual xeon scsi boxes, comes out to $2k/mo and should deliver 150M pvs/mo if your application is written well...
    I think he will be able to find cheaper servers of this configuration

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
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    New York, NY
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    3TB per month really isn't that much bandwidth usage. A beefy dual processor server with SCSI storage and a couple GB of RAM should saturate a 10Mbps link just fine.
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  12. #12
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Posts
    385
    p4 2.8 with 2xSCSI 10k, apache and 60G of static pics => 4.5T transfer per month max here, iowait=90-100% right now.
    Bottleneck are the disks most of the time.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
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    2,780
    Since it's for a ecommerce site, a hardware load balanced solution is probably the best.
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  14. #14
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
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    385
    Mfjp:why do you say that? I am currently DNS load balancing with dyndns.org - they claim/seem to have 100% uptime since 5 years (I believe that => which hardware can beat that?) and with TTL=300 I am getting very even traffic (+-5% on all 4 webnodes) - if a server goes down IE users automaically hit one of the other still working servers and with TTL=300 an automatic zoneupdate gets propagated pretty quickly...

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