[BlueOnyx:12512] Re: Large Website
Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet
cobaltfacts at virtbiz.com
Mon Mar 11 09:52:47 -05 2013
On 3/11/2013 8:40 AM, Richard Sidlin wrote:
> Hi list
> We have been asked to quote on what could be a large website that could
> grow quickly as more business come on board. MySQL will be the database
> of choice. Depending on the hardware, if I was to install BO and just
> use that installation for this one site, are there any limits that BO
> has or is it based entirely on the hardware? If we want to load balance
> it, would that be simple to do?
> Thanks
> Richard
Hi Richard,
I'm not sure what kind of limits you are looking for, but I can tell you
that we have customers that use relatively modest hardware to serve
"large" websites. (You know, that's sort of a relative term, right?) :)
When I measure large, I'm usually measuring by traffic in terms of
transfer. One of the sites in particular is on a PE-850 with 4GB RAM
running 5108R. It's an active writers and fan-fiction community that
is pushing a steady 30Mbps, peaking to about double that. That's a
fair amount of traffic, especially for a single box! Load average only
exceeds whole-number 1 when running Raqbackup.sh overnight.
Now, we have helped them "cheat" a little bit. For instance, we've
installed Lighttpd on the box and are using it to serve out much of the
static content on the sites. That takes a load off of Apache. We've
also counseled with them a bit on optimizing their sites for most
efficient loading. They came to us with a real basket-case, and they've
since done a pretty good job of cleaning things up. We are also
actively in the midst of helping them to redevelop their entire
community based on new code wrapped around a WordPress engine. The
launch of that is still some time away, but since they have now picked
up traffic from another couple of competing sites, I do not foresee the
traffic slowing down.
I wouldn't be scared away from a "big website". I would want to get
some more insight on exactly what that means. But I think I can
confidently say that BlueOnyx would be up to the task as much as any
other LAMP server would be. BX is no less capable than, say, cPanel or
Plesk or DirectAdmin when it comes to efficiently serving out a website.
OTOH, we have another customer who wasn't quite able to wrap their heads
around that, and instead got some advice from an outside consultant.
There has been all sorts of investment in servers, switches,
virtualization, load-balancing... and the site doesn't run any faster,
and certainly not as reliably. But, they didn't want to listen to us
when we made our recommendation (which was based on real-world use, not
some sort of theoretical shopping list.) <shrug> I've only been doing
this since 1996, so I probably don't have enough experience.
Please don't misunderstand me to be saying that a stock BX load is your
best bet in all cases. I just use that to illustrate that you shouldn't
get carried away with your system requirements.
If you need any help, let the list know. I'm sure there are some good
brains that can help you out if you get stuck!
--
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ
More information about the Blueonyx
mailing list