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  1. #1

    capacity planning/server sizing - best practice?

    This is a difficult question to answer, as if I were asking "how long is a piece of string", but I'd appreciate any thoughts.

    With regard to 'basic' web hosting - with regard to an 'average' hosted account...

    Are there guidelines or best practices when doing capacity planning for a web hosting server?

    Say if I were to have a 2.x Pentium or a AMD 2xxx server with 512MB RAM and an 80GB drive with 1TB of bandwidth, what would be the (ballpark) maximum number of accounts I could host on that server (without a dangerous amount of overselling)?

    I understand that there are many factors to be considered here, but I'm really looking for a best practice type of recommendation, not a hard and fast rule.

    Thanks in advance for any input.

  2. #2
    that would highly depend on what your offereing with your accounts. also many hosts oversell, so to compete in this market you'll actaully have to come up with 2 numbers. the numer of accounts you could fit if they fully utilized their allocated resources, and the number you realistically expect to use. in theory a single account who uses all their bandwidth and runs CPU intensive server side scripting such as forum sites or other application driver websites could use up more of your resources than another 20 users who aren't using more than 10% of their bandwidth and are hosting simple html pages.

    sorry i couldn't be more informative towards the actual numbers, just wanted to give you what i could as i myself do not specialize in webhosting.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    Charlotte, NC
    Posts
    2,761
    It really all depends on the size of the accounts sold. If you sell 5 high-storage, and high-bandwidth usage accounts, you'll end up using more resources than the personal website-sized package. Add accounts as long as the server is able to run smoothly with them, and expand to a new server when needed.

    -Josh

  4. #4
    Plan on running out of hardware resouces before you run out of bandwidth resources. I would have a hard time believing a machine with the specs you posted could reliably push 6+Mb/s (1200GB @ 95th) with the PHP and MySQL intensive sites so popular today.

    Bandwidth overselling will be your biggest hurdle, as I think a lot of hosts feel their machines can handle the amount of transfer they are allotted in their account. I would plan conservatively and provide a product that may be slightly more expensive, but more reliable in the long run.

    Sorry for the lecture, and good luck!

    Peter
    The Maag Group - Intelligent IT Solutions
    • Colocation • Dedicated Servers • Server Administration •
    www.maaggroup.com • 877.622.4477

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