Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Some newbie questions about VPS

[Lain]

Hello gang, it's been a long time since I've been on WHT, and now I need some help

I'm a moderator for a fairly active forum. About six weeks ago my friend moved to DreamHost to take advantage of their mega-bandwidth sales. Unfortunately, her account was disabled due to "resource overage".

We are assuming that we're probably using a lot of sql resources, and right now we are considering VPS providers. However, we're just webmasters and we don't know anything outside of shared hosting. The numbers I'm posting below? All Greek to us.

We're a fan-run customer forum for a perfumer. The perfumer's catalogue over 350 oil blends (and growing) and there are reviews for each product. We also encourage people to search before posting. Plus, the forum members are very chatty.

The forums consume about 33GB/month in bandwidth.

We have never had an issue with our previous host regarding resources. A friend of mine may think it's a coding issue. We're using a licensed Invision Board with some hacks installed. Again, we never had any problems for a year now (hacks and upgrades included) but were only with our new host for nearly six weeks.

Is a VPS what we should be looking into? Also, if this is a growing trend, then wouldn't it be all for nothing? We are looking for long-term hosting. A budget of $50/month is ideal but we are willing to pay more if need be.

I remember when I last visited WHT, ServInt was pretty popular (and I see they still are), but we're open to any suggestions regarding our situation

Here is some old stats about the forums (around the end of January 2005):

165132 posts
1123 registered members

A recent log (maybe around mid-February):

Process CPU seconds user machine count average
php.cgi 11595.6800 99.863% 48.315% 45021 0.258
sendmail 9.6600 0.083% 0.040% 1085 0.009
postdrop 6.2700 0.054% 0.026% 1085 0.006
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 11611.6100 100.000% 48.382% 47191
Average per day: 11611.6100 1 days
CPU percentage assumes 24000 cpu seconds per day total.

This was part of an email sent to my friend on February 22nd:

Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your fair
share of system resources on your hosting machine ugh. Our system has flagged your account ( ladydanger's Account #66824 ) because it is using a large number of cpu-minutes/day on ugh. We need you to trim down your resource consumption considerably. In many cases the cause of high resource consumption is forum software.

Specifically joylandp's cpu minute usage for the last few
days is as follows :
172.77, 145.22,129.16,55.92
This represents approximately 17.38% of the entire machines capacity.

[RobM]

I think you need a little more then a VPS...

You may want to look at dedicated server if your looking for long term.

[WindyCity]

I agree with RobM,

You need to be thinking about ample memory as well as everything else. A P4 w/HT and 2 gigs of ram will probably do you fine for now. You can probably find a fully managed server if you need the admin help for around 150.00 per month with those specs. I think I just saw a liquidweb special that includes a free 1gig stick of ram with their p4 and they are fully managed servers and an excellent company at that.

Maybe you can get some sponsers for your site to offset the costs? Good luck to you!

[Yaroslav]

IMHO, as for now you'll be OK on a middle-end VPS, just don't go for a cheapo. On the long-term, however, you gotta think of a decent dedicated - that would cost you no less than $100 without control panel (maybe you can live without it if it's your only website).

[dale]

I remember when I last visited WHT, ServInt was pretty popular (and I see they still are), but we're open to any suggestions regarding our situation

Since you mentioned ServInt, and I'm currently using ServInt so I can tell first hand that they give detailed answers... Forward the information you have here to ServInt's sales, and ask whether a VPS can handle it (they have several VPS plans by the way). I'm guessing they will probably forward it to their tech guys, and give you a good answer.

You can then use this information to make your decision, be it a more powerful VPS plan, or whatever. Even if, in the end, you decide not to go with ServInt, you would still have more information than you have right now.

Not to mention apart from the three plans listed on their website, they are also flexible enough to make arrangements for clients outgrown the Ultimate VPS plan. They also host dedicated servers. So you wouldn't have to worry about outgrowing your plan.

Just a thought...

[RRWH]

Originally posted by wcws
I agree with RobM,

You need to be thinking about ample memory as well as everything else. A P4 w/HT and 2 gigs of ram will probably do you fine for now. You can probably find a fully managed server if you need the admin help for around 150.00 per month with those specs. I think I just saw a liquidweb special that includes a free 1gig stick of ram with their p4 and they are fully managed servers and an excellent company at that.

Maybe you can get some sponsers for your site to offset the costs? Good luck to you!

I totally disagree that you need a server like is mentioned here!

I run a server for a forum that has 6500+ users, just under 300K posts and we are currently using around 150G data/mth

It is a phpBB/Mysql board and we are running on an AMD3000+, 1Gig Ram. As far as resources - we don't look like running into memory issues soon - we always have free memory As far as processor goes, we only ever see a load avg of 0.2 or less except when we are doing a backup of the database.

I don't know what sort of forum you are running and if it uses more resources than phpBB, but I would suggest that a VPS with at least 500Mhz of processor, 500Meg guaranteed RAM would do everything that you need for now. I am not sure if you may be running other forum software and if it needs a faster processor....

If your forum is growing fast then it may be better to consider a dedicated server.

Either way, by going to a VPS or a dedicated, you can get considerable gains by having the ability to tune/optomise your server for the task at hand!

[WindyCity]

I agree that a highend vps could do the trick but when you consider that when you go into the 512-768mb price range you are already knocking at the door of an entry priced dedicated.

[shriekingviolet]

Hi, I'm Lain's friend who's doing the shopping for a new host, thanks for everyone's replies.

My question is does the type of resource usage that my host described to me in the email Lain summaried for me in the first post sound typical for a board my size? We average about 675 posts a day, at the height of the day, there are usually about 60-70 members online, but during low hours it's only like 20-30. Sometimes there are days when we'll get a lot more traffic, and the users online numbers will push past 100 but that's maybe once or twice a month and it doesn't last all day. Unfortunately I don't have access to the raw logs with my account turned off. This just came as a surprise to me because the board have grown no busier than they were when I was with my previous hosts, and unlike with my account there, this forum is the only thing I've put there. And I would have thought my old host would have let me know if I were this kind of strain on their servers, but nothing was ever said. I just can't think of an explanation for a large jump in resource consumption that would have occurred since the beginning of February. I figured I'd have to eventually move beyond shared hosting, but I didn't think it would be this soon. And since resource consumption is the reason behind this problem, I just wanted to know how typical this looks just in case the problem isn't my forum traffic alone.

Thanks!

[grrrlennyl]

hi, sv! good luck getting all of this straightened out.