Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : RAID setup necessary on typical site? | server recommendations

[treoguy]

RAID setup necessary on typical site? | server recommendations

I've taken the scalable approach when it comes to servers for my various sites. With shared servers, I never really worried about backup or even hard drives going down. Same goes for VPS. For some reason, when I moved to dedicated servers, I outfitted them with 74GB SATA drives in a RAID setup. My understanding is that it protects me if one drive happens to fail. I've been lucky and haven't had that problem.
I'm at the point now where I'm looking to upgrade from a VPS paying around $75 per month to a dedicated server. I can stand to be down a day if a hard drive goes, if it means $75 a month in savings. My biggest concern would be suggestions on the best way to protect myself in the event of a catastrophe.
Contacted SoftLayer about possibly adding a second server for me and honoring the price I'm paying on my old server.
Finally, both the old and new site are seeing roughly 3,000 visits per day. The server I'm considering is a Clovertown 5320 1.86 dual quadcore, 4GB RAM, RAID, 2 74GB Cheetah drives,100mbps, 2000GB bandwidth. Is this overkill or the right server for the job?

[cristibighea]

Well, if your website is processor intensive, then the dual quad core should offer quite a lot of performance, but if it's dynamic and uses the database quite a bit you might want to up the RAM too; if you are however overestimating things, you could just go with a single quad, 4GB of RAM and 2HDDs in RAID-1, but keep in mind that RAID is never an alternative to backing up.





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[msherman]

Considering you're surviving on a VPS now the dual quad-core is *probably* overkill. It really depends, as cristibighea pointed out, how processor intensive your site is. You're looking at around 125 visits per hour; unless that spawns a lot of database or other dynamic activity you're probably just fine with a lot less processor.
With regards to the question you pose in the subject line; RAID isn't strictly necessary for most sites but it often times is included at very little or no additional cost (typically soft-RAID). So uless you're looking to save the few dollars per month, it's usually worth it to take a RAID 1 setup.
Aside from the data and service protection offered by RAID 1 there can also be read performance benefits.
Again, as noted above RAID isn't a replacement for backups.
Since you're looking at 74 GB drives I'm assuming you don't necessarily have a lot of data. It should be relatively inexpensive to find an off-site backup provider (like rsyncpalace.com) to which you can make backups. Then you're RAID protected and backup protected.





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[treoguy]

Thanks for your advice. I run forums, a social network, decent amount of ads and very large photos in my blog. While I'm surviving on the VPS, it's safe to say it's barely surviving. The site is at a crawl during the busy hours. While I don't host an ecommerce store, I do direct visitors to a store that's hosted by a different company. My concern is that I'm losing business with people who get frustrated with how slow the site is running. Like most things, the cost seems to pile up pretty quickly when outfitting a server.
I was able to get a quote of $295 for the following:
Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5310 - 1.60GHz (Clovertown) - 2 x 8MB cache
4 GB FB-DIMM Registered 533/667
SA-SCSI RAID 1 Disk Controller
2 x 73GB SA-SCSI 10K RPM
100 Mbps Public

[m4dm4n]

Quote:



Originally Posted by treoguy


I was able to get a quote of $295 for the following:
Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5310 - 1.60GHz (Clovertown) - 2 x 8MB cache
4 GB FB-DIMM Registered 533/667
SA-SCSI RAID 1 Disk Controller
2 x 73GB SA-SCSI 10K RPM
100 Mbps Public

[AWalrus]

It is very rare that CPU is the bottleneck. I'd spend my money on RAM first and then maybe on hard disk performance. Any multi-core CPU would probably do you fine.
I just got an Intel C2Q Q9400 quad processor with 4GBs RAM and a 500GB SATA drive for $99/month with $210 setup from NetDepot. I can double RAM to 8GBs when needed for a one time fee of $174 and add extra 500GB SATA drives for a one time fee of $139 per drive.
Seems like something like this would be a good step up from a VPS, before going directly to a dual-quad expensive server. Most people overestimate how much of a server is needed. To get better performance, you can run a PHP opcode cache and a lightweight web server (I run Xcache and nginx).





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[erickmiller]

Do you have any graphs of CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network utilization? It should point out where your bottleneck is, and then you can adjust appropriately.
Eric





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Quote:



Originally Posted by AWalrus


It is very rare that CPU is the bottleneck. I'd spend my money on RAM first and then maybe on hard disk performance. Any multi-core CPU would probably do you fine.


I disagree with that, as mentioned above, it depends on what kind of srvice he is offering, and if he is planning on a big number of accounts then CPU is important, but I understand he will be running single account multiple applications, I kinda recommend a Quad core, not a Dual Quad one for now, will be much cheaper and will keep it up.





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