Dedicated Server

[monty3222]

I am just starting my site and I wanted to get some feed back on how I should go about getting it up and running with the proper server.
should I start out with a dedicated server or just have a shared server. I really want my forum to run smoothly without a lot of lag time but don't wanna break
the bank at the same time. please let me know your feed back and suggestion will be greatly appreciated -Thanks

[3DKiwi]

A dedicated server will break the bank and would be overkill if you're just starting out. I started out with shared hosting about 6 years and have gradually had to keep upgrading to where I am now on a dedicated server with a medium sized forum and about 14,000 members (actually 80,000 but I delete inactive members). A VPS hosting plan is a good compromise.

Note that IPS doesn't allow members to recommend hosts other than themselves in the forums here since they do their own hosting. Hosting with IPS on one of their starter plans would ensure that you have the minimum of problems as they will set it up for you and can fix things when they go wrong as they do from time to time.

Hope this helps.

3DKiwi

[monty3222]

thanks I think i"m gonna stay with a shared for now as you suggested

[wimg]

Hi 3DKiwi,

A dedicated server will break the bank and would be overkill if you're just starting out. I started out with shared hosting about 6 years and have gradually had to keep upgrading to where I am now on a dedicated server with a medium sized forum and about 14,000 members (actually 80,000 but I delete inactive members). A VPS hosting plan is a good compromise.

Note that IPS doesn't allow members to recommend hosts other than themselves in the forums here since they do their own hosting. Hosting with IPS on one of their starter plans would ensure that you have the minimum of problems as they will set it up for you and can fix things when they go wrong as they do from time to time.

Hope this helps.

3DKiwi

I hope you don't mind me asking, as I am trying to figure out what steps we need to take currently, regarding our server.

We have > 30,000 members, which are generally all quite active, with > 20,000 unique people hitting our server each week, and > 1.3 million hits a day. Currently at 1.3 million posts, and 1.2 million of those over less than 3 years now. We are running a dedicated server with a virtualized system (makes upgrading easier after all), and seem to run into resource constraints with a Quad core at 2.3 GHz, 4 GB of RAM. The server has been optimized; mySQL reports 99.92 % to 99.96 % hits from cache.

Do you think we should be able to easily service a board like this on such a server, or do we indeed need to upgrade?

TIA for your considered opinion!

Kindest regards,
Wim

[monty3222]

thanks a lot for that information. Last question I have is there dramatic increase in speed with the dedicated server ?

[wimg]

Well, when we went from shared, to shared VPS, to dedicated, each time the answer was yes, but there also was quite an increase in IO, # of processors or core, and memory (RAM).

Essentially we did an upgrade because the older system got unmanageably slow, and/or suffered from too many problems.

We have problems currently, which is why I am asking the question here, just to make sure.

Kind regards, Wim

[monty3222]

Well, when we went from shared, to shared VPS, to dedicated, each time the answer was yes, but there also was quite an increase in IO, # of processors or core, and memory (RAM).

Essentially we did an upgrade because the older system got unmanageably slow, and/or suffered from too many problems.

We have problems currently, which is why I am asking the question here, just to make sure.

Kind regards, Wim

ok got it!

[3DKiwi]

Hi Wim. Yes I think these server specs would cope with this level of activity. What I've found lately and the big busy Neowin site also had the same issue was search engines indexing pages / the site far too fast. By editing the robots.txt file and adding a delay plus also your Google Webmaster account both them and my site were able to reduce the server load. My server now just idles away most of the time and easily copes with the load.

3DKiwi

[AnthonyKinson]

CentOS FTW ;~)

[wimg]

Hi 3DKiwi,

Hi Wim. Yes I think these server specs would cope with this level of activity. What I've found lately and the big busy Neowin site also had the same issue was search engines indexing pages / the site far too fast. By editing the robots.txt file and adding a delay plus also your Google Webmaster account both them and my site were able to reduce the server load. My server now just idles away most of the time and easily copes with the load.

3DKiwi

Thank you very much for your reply, much appreciated!

I did fix robots.txt already a week or so ago. 1 read per 5 seconds, I set the time frame, etc. I do find that most bots don't bother, based on the cpanel stats logs. They do read robots.txt, and still do whatever they like, although the bigger ones now more or less stick to the time window I indicated. Since that is the least busy time, it did make a significant difference already, from totally unusable to kind of usable, well, in combination with some other tuning that is.

I did some last bits of finetuning of the server and mySQL last night, and it now is performing quite well. I was amazed how much higher caches had to be set for this to work, although the last step was a relatively small incremental one which really made a very big difference quite suddenly.

So far I only see problems when having members visiting the board and doing maintenance stuff simultaneously. I guess I will have to bring the board offline completely when doing such things :D.

Kindest regards, Wim

CentOS FTW ;~)

Yep, that's what we are on. :D

Kind regards, Wim