Virtual Private Servers - Status report

[Matt]

[Post Updated!]

GlowHost VPS are now available!

Read more about Virtual Private Servers

Of notable interest: Semi-dedicated servers are now available.

[andychev]

At what sort of point should a VPS or dedicated server be considered? Hits wise / Transfer wise? I have tried to find out what size a 'large site' and medium sized site is but no one seems to want to put any number on this. Can you give me a rough idea?

[Matt]

its pretty impossible to put a number on it. Mainly a "large" site is going to be one that eats up 10% or more of the available shared server resources and is finding itself getting certain scripts disabled or perhaps in rare cases suspended for repeat problems.

So you could use a lot of transfer and have lots of hists and if your site is static use hardly any resources. If you have a PHP / MySQL driven website like most of us, then the same figures for hits and transfer can vary greatly based on how efficient your PHP scripts have been coded/optimized.

For example if you are running a PHP nuke site where the code is in general, extremely inefficient you might use the same resources as a site getting 5-10 times the traffic and hits on a more professional script. for example, these vBulletin forums for the most part run very efficiently in comparison to some of their open source counterparts.

A lot of "large site" can also mean userbase. Dedicated servers are notably 'up' a lot more than shared servers and once you reach a threshold of subscribers or visitors those 99% vs 99.5% vs 99.9% is going to become important whereas a less busy site might not even notice 97% uptimes.

So the question is hard to answer, it is similar to the question;
"How long is a piece of string?"

Generally, if you haven't already made the move, your host will suggest that you are ready for a dedicated server, or *some* (quite a few these days actually) hosts will suspend your site until you agree to buying a VPS or dedicated.

[andychev]

OK, I will phrase it differently! Is the main site i host likely to reach this limit any time soon? (username begining spe) It is built mainly on oscommerce but also has a lot of custom work done and we have just implemented a live help system.
Currently:
It is a very image heavy site and the images are auto thumbnailed using up lots of server? There is a back end database which links into the sql database for order processing. The product catalog is currently around 350 products.
6 Months Time:
We are aiming to double the number of visitors in the next 6 months. The product catalog will be expanded to 400 products and obvioulsy in doing that there will be increased load from the back end database.
12 Months Time:
We are looking to double the visitors again. Expand to 500+ Products
24 months:
Double visitors again
12 months +
Database accessed by an additional domain where suppliers will be able to print delivery notes / orders etc

Is this likely to cause a problem?

[Matt]

(username begining spe)

LOL. You have like 10 users beginning with that. Anyways the short answer is I see no issues currently with any of your accounts on that shared server so all is good for the time being.

So you are definately good to go now as of this posting.

[andychev]

oops! Forgot about the others! Thats good, I was just trying to plan ahead!

[andychev]

Matt - Any news on this?

I will definately be wanting one when they are available i figure it is best to jump than be pushed

No, there is a real reason! I am just busy developing a back end system for oscommerce for creating pdf delivery notes for suppliers of products so they can log in and print the required paperwork. This envloves converting 4 html pages into a pdf documents and returning them to the browser for the supplier to print.

This coupled with the traffic predictions for next summers peak period i dont really want to be on a shared server, just in case! I would much rather be on something over spec'd than under spec'd if that makes any sense .

[Matt]

Honestly not yet I don't have any updates for reasons that are too complicate to explain of a forum without writing a novel as to why... Basically its due to hold ups getting moved to the new datacenter.

I have 2 dedicated servers under $250 right now if you want one of those though.

[andychev]

Are they likely to be available within the next 3 months? $250 is a bit beyond what i was looking to spend i was ideally looking for a vps around $100

[Matt]

I hate to report that I really cannot say because it is a highly complex order of operations that needs to take place in order for us to get more rack space in the new datacenter.

We are waiting on some specialty parts, load balancers to be exact, that need to sit in front of some of our servers and since they are the first in the chain of hardware that provisions the servers I can't do anything until they have been (returned) to us from the manufacturer.

That hardware should have already been in place but one of the units we ordered was bad so had to be warranted. So I am at the mercy of their returns department as to when we will have that part back to us. I got off the phone with them about an hour ago and the parts are to ship back to us on Monday which means hopefully by Friday we will have them again and I speculate at least a week to configure them.

Once those are up and running we will start migrations to the new datacenter at some point which I can't imagine will take any less than 30 days to do it right.

Once all the servers are over there we will then have the time and space available to start setting them up.

In the mean time, there is an off chance that one of those 2 other servers MAY be setup for VPS IF they do not sell in the next week (or so)

Before we do that we are in the middle of a couple other things namely installing soholaunch site builder on the servers and also a new very nice shopping cart called Lite Commerce which blows away all that open source hoopla bundled in with cPanel and fantastico.

So as soon as those two software bundles have been deployed there may be time to work on VPS provided the servers are still available to install them.

And that is the abridged version of the current goings on here at GlowHost