[BlueOnyx:12515] Re: Large Website

[Richard Sidlin]

-----Original Message----- 
From: Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet 
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2013 2:52 PM 
To: BlueOnyx General Mailing List 
Cc: Richard Sidlin 
Subject: Re: [BlueOnyx:12508] Large Website 


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

Thanks Chris

I appreciate your advice. 


Richard