[BlueOnyx:12512] Re: Large Website

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

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