Hosting Advice

[Michael]

Hello all,

 

Which type of hosting would you invest in for a high availability website? A choice between Dedicated Hosting and Clustered Hosting. I think Clustered would get my vote, but what would you use and why? Any recommendations of providers would be welcome too. This would run on Linux and MySQL. Many thanks

 

My initial thoughts on Clustered Hosting are added redundancy and load balancing, as well as being more cost effective. All views would be welcome

[SC-UK]

Can't really comment on the choice of hosting type, but I would definitely have a look at CS New Media. Carl's on here and an all round good guy.

 

CS New Media Web Hosting

[Michael]

Thanks, but as far as I can see CS New Media do not offer Dedicated or Clustered hosting solutions but only shared or VPS.

 

Personally I'm not a fan of VPS because you may have 20 customers for example, with each of them running separate processes which consequently eats up CPU cycles. Lets say each of them are running/using 10 processes; that would mean 200 processes running at once. It's not that efficient.

[john]

Carl @ CSNM will offer what you need, so talk to him, if you say I need X,Y and Z he will sort it and tell you what it will cost you, his service is unbelievably, replying to tickets at stupid o'clock and solving little niggles that I should do but can't see the tick box for tiredness etc, he is a VERY good guy and well worth talking to.

[Soulfish]

Personally for a site that needed 99.999%+ uptime then I'd seriously be looking at some form of clustered hosting.

 

I'd likely look at using something like the Amazon elastic compute cloud to easily run multiple web servers across a number of datacentres, and when needed, increase the capacity at the touch of a button

[matt40k]

Thanks, but as far as I can see CS New Media do not offer Dedicated or Clustered hosting solutions but only shared or VPS.

 

Personally I'm not a fan of VPS because you may have 20 customers for example, with each of them running separate processes which consequently eats up CPU cycles. Lets say each of them are running/using 10 processes; that would mean 200 processes running at once. It's not that efficient.

 

 

You'll be suprised, CPU isn't the problem with VPS, most VPS servers hardly use any CPU, it's the IO that's the problem. You just can't get fast enough discs.

 

@Soulfish

I heard there have been issue with Amazon's load balancers where it doesn't always fall-over quickly, so it can take mins to recover. If this is true you'll be better off with a good VPS\dedi.

 

www.clustered.net is good for dedicated VPS, REALLY fast. Also www.laughingsquid.us is using RackSpace would are just awesome.

[RingOfFlame]

How about {removed by users request} Edited March 30, 2010 by SYNACK
Removed possibly questionable link by users request

[Michael]

The best I've found is iweb.com which appear to be offering exactly what I am looking for. They offer both load balancing and web clusters.

 

All opinions welcome, but thanks all for your contributions and vote

[CSNM-Carl]

Thanks, but as far as I can see CS New Media do not offer Dedicated or Clustered hosting solutions but only shared or VPS.

 

Personally I'm not a fan of VPS because you may have 20 customers for example, with each of them running separate processes which consequently eats up CPU cycles. Lets say each of them are running/using 10 processes; that would mean 200 processes running at once. It's not that efficient.

 

It's not as simple as this. The servers we use are very high-end with 2 x quad-core processors, and each core hyper-threaded giving us "16 cores" per server in total. We also operate services which carefully manage the priority of every process to ensure that processes are spread most efficiently across all cores, and that each VPS gets a reasonable amount of CPU time. Having 200 processes running at once is almost nothing, the servers we use can can very easily handle significantly more processes than this with thousands of processes being quite normal without impacting performance at all.

 

Disk I/O isn't that much of a problem either to be honest, especially if using SAS disks in RAID10.

 

The above cannot be said about all VPS providers though.

 

What type of website/application do you need to host that requires such a high level of uptime/redundancy out of interest? It's good to see you are planning things properly.

[matt40k]

Disk I/O isn't that much of a problem either to be honest, especially if using SAS disks in RAID10.

 

What planet are you on? I think you need to read about seek times etc. It might be ok if your server is full of IRC servers.

[CSNM-Carl]

What planet are you on? I think you need to read about seek times etc. It might be ok if your server is full of IRC servers.

 

We don't allow IRC services on our servers. Are you familiar with looking after & running a VPS hosting environment Matt?

[matt40k]

Beg your pardon, forgot redfox doesn't allow IRC.

 

Nope. I know people who are, who are a little more experienced then I, who tell me the problem with VPS providing is disc IO. After all, a 16GB server will have about 50 customers, 50 people hitting the disc will cause a bit of a IO performance issue, unless they don't really use the disc. Stuff like IRC don't really touch the disc. You may have alot of throughput, but if the disc is having to travel back and forth it's going to bottleneck, even at 15k rpm.

[Michael]

What type of website/application do you need to host that requires such a high level of uptime/redundancy out of interest? It's good to see you are planning things properly.

 

I can't really say at the moment, but soon will all be revealed. I don't actually need such hosting at the current time, however it's good to explore options and keep my options open.

 

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions with VPS, but as you correctly mentioned I have been stung badly in the past using a VPS solution, but you live and learn. At the time it was a VPS using 64bit Windows and the reliability and performance was appalling.

 

To be honest it's not so much high bandwidth that I need but more high uptime and with a web cluster this is much more feasible. Taking one server down for an upgrade or even a simple reboot keeps the site live.

[vikpaw]

I'm for clustered too, for similar reasons, failover, load balance, expandability, etc.

things to consider, what do you want the high availability for? speed/storage, or uptime, lack of failure, ease of maintenance...

 

EDIT: currently planning our sharepoint setup, self-hosted, but thinking about having two less powerful front end webservers, so can fiddly around with 1, bring it down, update and restart, whilst the other takes the load, then switch and update other. i don't mind if it's slow for a while, plus they wont be being hammered.

 

if i wanted loads of users and to have lots of fast access, would probably go for single more powerful box, with spread of fast drives, and live with downtime. though longterm a combo option would seem best.

Edited March 27, 2010 by vikpaw
addition

[Michael]

what do you want the high availability for?

 

Primarily it'll be for uptime, redundancy and also ease of maintenance. Quite rightly it'll also allow me to add additional servers as and when necessary.

 

To be honest I don't think web servers need to be extremely powerful. When I see hosting providers offering Core 2 Quad servers it sounds appealing, but I would rather have two or more less powerful servers based on Celeron's for example. Even a low end Celeron can process traffic efficiently. Memory and hard disks are more important in a hosting solution rather than the processor.

[Michael]

After investigating and communicating with iWeb they're not entirely what I am looking for and to be honest their customer service was rather disappointing. I've been amazingly unsuccessful at finding a suitable host for my project and I welcome other solution providers anyone can recommend

[Soulfish]

I use TSOHost for my hosting needs. They have a "clustered" solution that I'm on that works quite well.

 

If you don't want to use Amazon's Cloud Compute platform have you considered the Rackspace Cloud hosting platform? Cloud Hosting - Cloud Servers & Files - Rackspace UK - Should be pretty good being rackspace

[Michael]

TSOHost looks very interesting. Many thanks.

[Michael]

I contacted Tsohost at 11:28am with 5 questions and got a reply at 11:40am. That's pretty good in my book!

[Soulfish]

I contacted Tsohost at 11:28am with 5 questions and got a reply at 11:40am. That's pretty good in my book!

 

I've done that at 3am in the morning before with their support line and had a response back within 5 minutes and the problem (that I'd created) fixed