Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Need Dedicated Under 600 a month

[registercheaper]

I currently have the following with Liquidweb:

2000 GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth
(1000in + 1000out)
» Dual Xeon 2.66GHZ Hyperthreaded
» 2GB DDR Registered ECC
» 120GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
» 120GB IDE Backup Drive
» Linux - CentOS 4
» Cpanel Fully Manage

The current plan is 300 per month for this hosting. BUT I have a large game site that has been exceeding the bandwith (Mysite is using 1400GB) at liquidweb causing me to pay 800 dollars per month. This is not the only problem I have. About once a week my site is visited by over 1000 school kids at 12 noon. every week on this day at this time the Apache will crash on my site causing over 1000 angry school kids. Every week at this time I have to call Liquidweb to fix the problem. LiquidWeb is VERY nice and I love there service BUT this happens every week and the school is going to stop using my site if I don't fix this problem. The load on the site is not a problem...maybe it's because all the kids login to the site at once? I don't know...but anyway I need it fixed. I'm currently thinking about using the service listed below at

Site: http://www.steadfastnetworks.com/

Dual 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon Processors
120 GB 7200 RPM IDE Hard Drive
1 GB Registered ECC DDR SDRAM
Unmetered 10 Mbit/sec port
Silver Management
Remote Reboot Port
$449.95 per month | $49.95 Setup
Availability: 1 Server Available

Can someone that know about hosting please give me some advice on what I should do? Please tell me what is 10 Mbit/sec port? should I swich to this? What should I switch to?


Thank you VERY VERY MUCH

PS liquidweb is a great company with great people and I'm happy with them..I just need to fix some problem.

[Alex]

Steadfast Networks is an excellent company. I currently have a VPS from them, and have yet to be let down. Out of the 5 months I have been using them I have only had 1 day where their network experienced a bit of packet loss (about 6 hours out of that day). Their support staff is quick, smart, and professional. They also have great prices.

Good luck,

[ericabiz]

Well, if your site is falling over, you obviously don't want to downgrade the amount of RAM you have in the server (the Steadfast server has 1GB and your current server has 2GB.)

Often, when our customers encounter this sort of situation and the site that is using a lot of bandwidth is MySQL-dependent, we'll recommend a separate server housing MySQL only. You actually don't even need a separate control panel for the MySQL server, which causes it to be a bit cheaper.

A similar setup which a fair amount of our customers have is as follows:

Web Server w/ 2 Ethernet cards (this would be your dual Xeon server)
At least 2GB RAM
However much hard drive space you need (I'd recommnd doing RAID-1 on the hard drives and then backing up to a separate server; I don't understand this nonsense of "a backup drive" -- it really doesn't protect you in a lot of situations.)
Control panel

Then, on a 192.168.x.x network, you'd have a separate server (probably at least a P4 and maybe a dual Xeon), again with a minimum of 2GB RAM. This server doesn't need a control panel since it's only running MySQL, and the whole setup is more secure since your most valuable data (MySQL databases) is housed on a server without a direct connection to the Internet.

This setup is, of course, assuming your websites are MySQL-dependent. If they're not, examine what's taking up the most resources on the server, and see if you can offload that to a separate server as described above. Images and video downloads should be fairly easy to offload in a similar way; for instance, images.yoursite.com on a separate server.

Hope this helps,
-Erica

[wheimeng]

Indeed, doing so would be downgrading your server spec, which I highly doubt it would help your site in any way.

[Alex]

Steadfast has the option to add an extra gig of RAM for $250 straight setup fee. It would also be in your favor to add another drive on your Steadfast box.

Good luck,

[jt2377]

why not get two unmetered servers with a bit lower spec and do a load balance? i know theplanet offer load balance and ev1 too.

i think unmetered and load balance will be the answer. instead getting just one server.

[Ariel74]

I agree with jt2377 - unmetered is probably the way to go.

[registercheaper]

Originally posted by Simpli-Erica
Well, if your site is falling over, you obviously don't want to downgrade the amount of RAM you have in the server (the Steadfast server has 1GB and your current server has 2GB.)
-Erica

Thanks Erica,
Yes of couse I will keep the 2gig of ram...But can you tell me about how much all the stuff in your post will cost...roughly. I'm a new booty to this.

PS my site does use alot of mysql

[registercheaper]

Originally posted by jt2377
why not get two unmetered servers with a bit lower spec and do a load balance? i know theplanet offer load balance and ev1 too.

i think unmetered and load balance will be the answer. instead getting just one server.

Thanks for your info
I don't know what a load balance server is...I will do my research (google) now on load balance servers.

[RyanD]

If the machine is properly optimized something along these lines should be exactly what youwould need

Dual Xeon 2.8ghz w/ht (1mb cache)
2 gb ram
2 x 1xx drives (s-ata is preferable)

It sounds like you are suffering from a limitation of resources in some form. It could be a poor mysql configuration that is driving memory consumption out of control.

Generally this is something that managed services would monitor, analyze and make recomendations on changes.

You should be able to find a truely managed xeon with 10mbps for a fair amount under your $600 budget.

Also, since it sounds like you are getting large bursts of visitors a 10mbps capped solution is not for you. You'd want to get something such as 3,300gb on a 100mbps burstable port.

[registercheaper]

Originally posted by WireSix
If the machine is properly optimized something along these lines should be exactly what youwould need

Dual Xeon 2.8ghz w/ht (1mb cache)
2 gb ram
2 x 1xx drives (s-ata is preferable)

It sounds like you are suffering from a limitation of resources in some form. It could be a poor mysql configuration that is driving memory consumption out of control.

I contacted support and they said it was because I had a limit on my connections of 150 (whatever that means) and I was doing much more than that. They increased my connections to 500 recently. I will see if that works next week when the school logs in.
Thanks

[jt2377]

load balance http://www.theplanet.com/control/cus...load_balancing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balance

hope this help. i think two unmetered load balance servers will ease your website traffics.

[PixelManual]

Originally posted by registercheaper
I contacted support and they said it was because I had a limit on my connections of 150 (whatever that means) and I was doing much more than that. They increased my connections to 500 recently. I will see if that works next week when the school logs in.
Thanks

What they meant by that is; Only 150 people could simultaneously connect and use the site (or most likely the mySQL database). Now 500 people can do that.

I suggest jt2377's idea also. (Load balance)

[RyanD]

Originally posted by ImageTutorials
What they meant by that is; Only 150 people could simultaneously connect and use the site (or most likely the mySQL database). Now 500 people can do that.

I suggest jt2377's idea also. (Load balance)

I love how everyone that doesn't understand the problem simply assumes that by throwing hardware at the situation will resolve the problem. That is the absolute worst thing you can do.

First someone needs to do a detailed analysis of why your site is slow.

In this case a max connections of 150 in apache would bring it to a halt with any reasonable amount of traffic. How many threads/servers are running? what is min/max? is keepalive on or off? what is the timeouts? how many requests per child? Apache 1.3.x or 2.0.x. What is your my.cnf like, what is your database like... is it primarily read or heavy read/write.

Just adding more b/w or load balancing doesn't really solve anything.

[KarlZimmer]

I would just like to note that the Interworx control panel supports load balancing by default, and may be a good option for such a situation. We have been quite impressed with their product since we started using it several months ago.