Dedicated Server questions

[Streetlight]

Hello v7n!
I am a web administrator at Stanceworks.com. Currently we rent a server from Siteground.com the specs are Single Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz, 4gb Ram, 10 TB Traffic, 500gb HD we pay $219 a month. We are running out of resources, and according the support, they are killing our php scripts etc so our server doesn't crash which is leading to constant 500 Internal Server Errors on our server.

My question is this, we receive almost 30,000 visitors on peak days, after being online for just over a year, so we are growing. What company should we look at for renting a new dedicated server, and what kind of server specifications should I get? I am trying to figure out what the best upgrade path would be.

Bottom line; what server should we upgrade to, and what company is both cheap and reliable?

[ldcdc]

You need to find out what the bottleneck is, be it memory, CPU or disk activity.

Have your host help you out, or hire a system administrator.

You may be able to prolong using that same server using a combination of internal script caching (WP has lots of cache plugins to choose from), diminishing the number of posts presented per page, letting go of non crucial plugins, installing something like Varnish to cache pages or using nginx to server static content (images etc.). A good RAID solution and/or an upgrade to faster hard drives may also improve i/o performance - that is if disk activity is the main culprit of the situation you're in.

[pingpipe]

If I were you I'd consider a dual quad core server with at least two hard drives in RAID. Your current server only has one hard drive - that's a single point of failure. If you've got the budget available it would also be worthwhile to think about two servers with load balancing

[csm]

Originally Posted by pingpipe

If I were you I'd consider a dual quad core server with at least two hard drives in RAID. Your current server only has one hard drive - that's a single point of failure. If you've got the budget available it would also be worthwhile to think about two servers with load balancing

Could you tell me please which OS supports dual quad core? None, afaik.

Find the bottleneck, hire a system administrator, ask your hosting company...

I run some dedicated servers and I know for sure that there is a bottleneck (most it's disk i/o related).

Check with e.g. top (if you use Debian) and look at your web stats for peak times (while checking with top).

Check your machine config, web server config, Apache module's config's, ...

If you have a lot of database accesses (e.g. when using a CMS), check those configs (e.g. mySQL), use caching (with Apache not a big problem).

Optimize your front-end of the website, combine CSS/JS, use content compression, caching, cookieless domain (watch the URL in my signature)...

There is a lot that can cause it, but 30000 shouldn't be a problem for a XEON machine.

[instantit]

Is this server hosting multiple site as it is a shared hosting server or simply just hosting for one website? If it is hosting only for one website, perhaps you can consider on CDN services for reducing the server load when it is retrieving the static files such as images.

[Vijayalaxmi796]

Yes you are right... it would also be worthwhile to think about two servers with load balancing

[Mia]

Did you ever get this rectified?

[lwbbs]

You should upgrade your CPU and RAM.
Dual Quad-Core CPU
16GB RAM or more.

You also can upgrade HD to RAID 10.

[choopamatt]

Streetlight - I would definitely recommend increasing your RAM and adding a 2nd hard drive so you can run RAID. Those two revisions alone should not be too expensive and I would expect you to see improvement.
However, if your budget allows, you may consider a 2nd server, one for web and one for data, with load balancing.