Question regarding Dedicated Servers?

[franco]

I have some questions regarding dedicated servers.

I have been looking at the website rackforce.com where I can rent
dedicated servers. Lets say I would rent a Viper DDS with Pentium 4 1.7Ghz / 1GB DDR SDRAM / 2x 60GB UltraDMA 7200RPM / Managed Support Package includes Firewall, Backups and Monitoring

cost = $264 Month

1.) Are these servers managed if I take the Support Package $75 Month.
2.) How many websites can I host on this server without overloading.
3.) Regarding bandwith what would you recommend
Unmetered Connection is free
Dedicated 5 Mbps Connection $175 month
Dedicated 10 Mbps Connection $425 month
50-500GB pre-paid Dedicated 100 Mbps Connection from $99.5 - $895
4.) What about databases? Is it better to have them on a second server

Here is the policy about bandwith usage at rackforce.com

Unmetered Connection: A multi-homed, full-duplex 100Mbps shared access port is included FREE with each dedicated server sold by RackForce. It is a perfect entry point for most hosting resellers and companies offering dedicated e-commerce, e-mail, database and dns solutions. This level of shared connectivity is perfect for the typical hosting reseller with as many as 500 domains on a single server. Please Note: RackForce does enforce some quality of service (QoS) routing on this shared bandwidth model to ensure more consistent performance for all users. (i.e. A client will not be able to monopolize bandwidth at the expense of his neighbors.)

Dedicated 5Mbps Connection: For more demanding applications RackForce offers a multi-homed, full-duplex 5Mbps dedicated access port for a small monthly fee. This dedicated level of connectivity provides for greater and more consistent throughput then an Unmetered connection even though the connection is rate limited to 5Mbps of egress + 5Mbps of ingress.

Dedicated 10Mbps Connection: Same as the Dedicated 5Mbps Connection only the port is rate limited to 10Mbps.

Dedicated 100Mbps Connection: For enterprise and other high demand, high performance sites, Rackforce can provide a multi-homed, full-duplex 100Mbps dedicated access port. This type of connectivity is purchased on a "bank account" model. Bulk purchases of 50, 100, 250 and 500 GB+ of bandwidth are available at discounted rates. Your bandwidth usage is metered and subtracted from your "bandwidth account" on a daily basis. Only when your "bandwidth account" approaches zero (0) do you need to purchase another block of Bandwidth. These blocks can also be spread out over multiple servers. Please Note: This is NOT a monthly charge. Only when the GBs of bandwidth in your account reaches zero (0) -- in a week or a year it does not matter -- do you have to purchase more bandwidth. Also, this model includes automatic notification and bandwidth overdraft protection services. For more information and the latest bandwidth pricing please contact a sales representative at

[John Scott]

http://www.internet-hosting-report.com/rackforce.php

I wanted to colo there, and their communication seems to be off and on. Seems support has gone downhill these last few months as well. ...
:

[franco]

Thanks for telling me. I know that you like Server Beach and I would go
for them if they were managed. Is there a service out there who can do this for a monthly fee because I dont know anything about administrating a server. Do you know any books that you can recommend regarding this matter?

[John Scott]

RackSpace is managed. I'm not saying RackForce is altogether bad - just not liking the recent lack of support connectivity.

Are you planning on hosting hundreds of websites, or just your own? If you are willing to learn, I'm thinking it's not that hard to learn server administration. You can always pay to have a server admin on call.

[franco]

I am just asking for future plans. How many websites can I host on 1 server without overloading. Yes I am willing to learn, are there any books that you can recommend regarding server administration?

[John Scott]

One GB of RAM... Well, it depends on a lot of things. If the sites are mostly static - no MySQL databases to use of the RAM - then you could probably put 200 or 300 average traffic websites on there.

If the sites use a lot of CPU - like http://www.aquariumadvice.com/ - then only a few per server.

No books that I know of.

[franco]

How many high demanding websites like http://www.aquariumadvice.com would it be per server aprox?
Do I get 1GB RAM with Server Beach ? I can get up to 4GB RAM at rackforce.com if I go for the Raptor server. Do you think it´s better to have 2 servers 1 for the websites and the other for the database?

[fishfreek]

WHOO. JS tossing my site around in examples of high traffic. Im so proud.

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/awstat....aquarium.html

Above you can see a link to my live websats as of midnight. I really want to shy away from giving you a number as far as the number of websites of this kind of traffic a given server would support because there are so many vairables. I am on the Power 2600 server from SB and this site is basicly all alone on that server. Our server load will hover around .10-.20 depending on number of visitors, etc.

I would guess that you would not see a performance drop until you had 5 or more sites of that load on a single box. To many high load sites and you will find yourself in a CPU crunch or an ISO crunch for disk access times. Thus the overall load times of pages will begin to lenghen. Of course if you had only one or two larger traffic sites you could fill the box up with some smaller traffic sites aswell.

There is a point that splitting the database and webserver aspects apart into seperate box's makes sense. AquariumAdvice is not at that point and probably wont be there for a while.

When sizing the box you need to think about the kind of traffic you will want it to support. Is this box going to be for a hosting venture or for a website you have or plan on having? What kind of site will it be? database driven? Static? Multimedia? What is your perceved number of visits and visitors per day? What kind of page views do you expect to see? All of these will factor in the overall performance of one box over another.

[franco]

Over 2000 thats alot of traffic you get each day. I don´t know what kind of websites I will be hosting and if they are going to be high traffic database driven or only static. I dont even know if I will rent a server in the future or only stay with a reseller account. I am new into this server thing and there seems to be alot to learn. But lets say I would rent a server at rackforce.com 1 for the websites with: Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz 2GB DDR ECC SDRAM 2x60GB UltraDMA 7200RPM and the second one for the database with Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz 4GB DDR ECC SDRAM 2x60GB UltraDMA 7200RPM this would cost me $938 Month with the managed support package. Do you think I could host 15 - 20 high demanding like yours with this package?

[John Scott]

It's not just the traffic. It's applications that use the database. www.suzuki-bikes.com gets the same amount of traffic as Aaron's site, but it doesn't use anywhere near the same amount of CPU.

A few things can run up the CPU like crazy - like a spell checker some phpBB's use.

[fishfreek]

like a spell checker some phpBB's use

HEHE. Guess its hard to be efficent with a mysql query verifying the word is correct based upon a table with several hundred thousand entries.

[franco]

Thanks for the advice

[fishfreek]

By off loading the DB to a second server that should help alot yes.

Going with a scsi interface for the hard drives will also help as database queries are also disk IO intensive.