I've always been somewhat torn on good ways to do hosting because a lot of situations can dictate having to do so many unique things it isn't worth going the most efficient route. I had done some consulting for a company that was near my house in VA and they had like 13 servers, all these big 3-4U old dual P3 boxes and a few dual 2.8 Xeons (P4 era) in a 2U. All of their content was static, and they knew Apache was barely doing anything, but they refused to consolidate because they ran mail on each server to make it easier to manage users or some BS. They also handled a considerable amount of spam and spent hours and hours screwing with mail. I told them they should consolidate to a couple 2.8 machines, if not one and either consolidate mail or start putting people on Google Apps, which they said even Google says not to put business stuff on. Maybe that was mentioned for @gmail accounts, but not for Apps for your domain, that is geared for business.
Since seeing that and learning more over time, I think a good solution, which obviously wouldn't work everywhere would be going the route of centralized storage and moving dedicated customers in with the rest of the herd. Custom requirements can add complexity, but if it is just a special setup in Apache its no big deal and since a lot of dedicated customers don't manage their own boxes it is less likely it is super custom. So in this setup you have say 1 or 2 SAN/NASs on the backend, attach 4 webservers on the front, with matching configs that are load balanced. This gives your dedicated clients who need the extra power more potential power, and utilize the CPU cycles and disk I/O that the small client's aren't using. Need even more power, you throw another machine on there. You are essentially having 4 identical boxes, serving identical content, but giving yourself more fault tolerance at the web server level and more traffic potential per site. It also reduces the costs of doing business. I don't know how you have things setup, what sites you host, or anything so I don't expect you to do any of those things haha. That solution was based on what I would do if I was starting a hosting company or migrating those idiots into something. I thought I would mention it though, it might spark and idea. IMO There are a considerable number of solutions that can optimize how hosting is done and a lot of people don't do them, I also see a number of reasons why people are hesitant to use them or unable to use them. Speaking of small form factor servers http://www.macminicolo.net/ was something I came across the other day, thought it was an interesting idea. I've never used OS X for serving, probably wouldn't (not that it would be a bad choice), but just because I am more comfortable with Linux. On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Jeff Lasman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Saturday 03 January 2009 10:20 pm, Peter Manis wrote: > > > Sorry for the lack of specifying in the first post, I was mainly > > directing it to their situation and how RAID1 was a poor choice. The > > reason RAID5 and RAID6 are much faster at reading is the same reason > > RAID0 is superior in read speed to RAID1. The data is spread across > > a number of drives and when the data is read back each drive pulls > > small chunks to reconstruct the file. If each drive in the array can > > do a max of 120MB/s you are going to get significant speeds when > > pulling from multiple drives at once. > > Thanks for the clarification, Peter. > > We're always looking for ways to have more efficiency along with high > availability, but it's not as easy as in corporate solutions because > our product is (mostly) individual dedicated servers. We're now > looking into webservers using atom processors and/or smaller > form-factor hard drives. > > Jeff > -- > Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services > P.O. Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 > Our jplists address used on lists is for list email only > voice: +1 951 643-5345, or see: > "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"; > _______________________________________________ > LinuxUsers mailing list > [email protected] > http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers > -- Peter Manis (678) 269-7979
