Comments on: Server Specs – We Need Your Help

By: Kirk

Kirk — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:34:34 +0000

I’ll echo the statement that some of those quotes seem a tad high for what you’re quoting. But I do have a question about what you claim the site is doing. You said you’re doing 400GB of transfer a week. What exactly is using up that much bandwith? I’ve been reading the site daily for the last few months and I don’t recall seeing any media that should be using a lot of bandwidth.

I run a site that is a tad busier than this one, it sounds. up 6K unique users a day, 20,000 page views and a hell of a lot more media and we don’t come close to that number.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:20:35 +0000

I’m not really on the hardware side of tech things, so I can’t comment on what’s ideal for a server.

But, I can say there’s been a few times in the past few weeks where the site has been down when I visited, or I received a page with a bunch of jumbled garbage – almost like the browser received the wrong content-type in the request and didn’t know how to display anything.

My point being is that I just say “aww shucks, I’ll check on Hemant in an hour or so.” So I don’t really expect 100% uptime, super-speedy access, etc. If the site is down or slow, I just check it a bit later. Unless Hemant is generating big revenue off this site, I wouldn’t strive for the type of performance and uptime implied by the specs in the original post.

By: AnotherGuy

AnotherGuy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:47:21 +0000

I’m not resistant to change at all, or cloud computing, or anything else for that matter. But, I’m not going to jump onto a single solution just because a few people say that it’s the correct one (isn’t that the atheist way, not taking what others say as truth just because they say it?). I need to be sure before I put this site under any more strain of switching servers.

I’m very open to discussing this with any of you over email.

By: Bjorn Watland

Bjorn Watland — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:52:42 +0000

mnatheists.org is running off of BlueHost, and we ran into the CPU page a few times when I had a plugin misconfigured, or something else wrong on the site. BlueHost has been pretty helpful in nailing down a troublesome file.

By: Dan Florien

Dan Florien — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:50:37 +0000

It sounds like you have a bunch of us tech guys giving you the same advice. Many of us do this for a living. I don’t mean to be rude either, but you wanted our advice, and there it is. We all think it’s overkill.

I don’t understand why there would be so many php requests if the cache is enabled. Seems like there should only be requests once for a new post and then for each comment. Either something is misconfigured, or as I said, your VPS host is overselling.

Why are you so resistant to cloud? That’s obviously the future of web hosting, and it seems crazy not to use it — it’s perfect for this! If it’s because you don’t resell it, I’m sure they have affiliate or reseller plans. I don’t see any downside.

By: AnotherGuy

AnotherGuy — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:37:45 +0000

Or this site gets a lot more php requests than you guys think. Let’s run the numbers again. I don’t mean to sound rude, but I want to make sure you guys all see where we’re at. This is a problem that needs a solution pretty soon.

16,000 + pageviews a day
400 GB of bandwidth in one week
300 MB of storage taken up
On a virtual server.

If any of you have noticed the loss of editing comments, etc… it’s because I’ve already disabled any plugins that are causing issues. There are some that are still up that aren’t hurting anything.

WP-Supercache is set up, I have the notification that it is on turned off…cause we don’t need to advertise someone elses website.

Email me with any other questions
timothy.stiffler@anotherguy.us

By: Dan Florien

Dan Florien — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:26:22 +0000

“Dedicated servers are also for people who don’t want their sites to fail…ever”

No, that’s cloud computing. Sites are spread over multiple machines in multiple locations, reducing single points of failure.

I’ve run a couple dedicated servers for 8 years. There have been many failures, even using rackspace. It’s usually back up in an hour or so, sometimes two, but it still happens.

There’s a single point of failure for dedicated servers, unless you’re using a load balancer (and then hopefully that won’t fail). Software upgrades can leave your server in a state of disaster. Hackers can get root access if an exploit is faster than you (and thus you have to love maintenance). The hard drive can fail (RAID helps there). Apache can get overloaded. DDoS attacks. Oh, they fail.

I just can’t imagine choosing dedicated hosting for a blog like this, especially with the easy, cheap options that are available.

Also, whoever is selling your VPS is overselling them if this site is this slow with one.

By: cipher

cipher — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:49:38 +0000

And it takes a LOT longer to post a comment – and I had to add this as a second comment b/c it wouldn’t allow me to edit!

By: cipher

cipher — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:48:24 +0000

Slightly off-topic:

Since the change-over, my name and email are no longer remembered. Also, formatting buttons are gone, and it no longer allows me to edit my comment after posting.

(If this is an example of natural selection, no wonder the Christians don’t like it!)

By: AM

AM — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:53:28 +0000

RAID.

Trust me. You need to mirror your disks. You’ll be happy you did later when (not if) a disk dies.