DA Hardware help required!

M

-m9-

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Dec 8, 2004
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Hi guys,

I have been looking at directadmin for a while - I'm now pretty sure it is suitable for my needs.

At the moment I am hosting approx. 80 high usage websites on 1 server, and email on another server (approx. 400 POP3 accounts). As I understand it, I will need to host my customer websites and email on one server with DA - but what would be the minimum spec for this amount of users?

Ideally I'd like to buy a server that can handle another 200 to 300 websites (each with 5 POP3 accounts).

Any help would be much appreciated!
 
Tough to say really. You can start with a server with dual Opteron 242 and 2 -3 GB of memory, hardware raid 1, 2 sata or scsi 73 to 120GB hard drives.
 
Opteron - really? I was expecting somthing like a P4 3.4Ghz :o

Although - let me clarify the max amount of sites I'd put on it is 200 (not all high useage) but I'd probably stick a few more on there if they aren't busy sites. I'd probably only have 150 high useage sites on it.

Thanks.
 
Well that is much different then what you previously stated:

"Ideally I'd like to buy a server that can handle another 200 to 300 websites (each with 5 POP3 accounts)."

So that would have been 280 -380 websites of which 80 are high traffic.

So what is high usage to you? How much data are these sites moving? How much email do these high usage sites push? Will you be using Clam AV? How many and how large are the databases for these "high traffic" sites?
Are the databases written efficiently, is the scripting for accessing the databases written efficiently?
You really need to know this to determine what you need. How much more is a dual opteron or dual Xenon anyway?

If you don't mind paying a large setup fee, you can get a a fairly stacked dual opteron server from gnax for $159 a month.
 
Last edited:
rldev said:
Well that is much different then what you previously stated:

"Ideally I'd like to buy a server that can handle another 200 to 300 websites (each with 5 POP3 accounts)."

So that would have been 280 -380 websites of which 80 are high traffic.

So what is high usage to you? How much data are these sites moving? How much email do these high usage sites push? Will you be using Clam AV? How many and how large are the databases for these "high traffic" sites?
Are the databases written efficiently, is the scripting for accessing the databases written efficiently?
You really need to know this to determine what you need. How much more is a dual opteron or dual Xenon anyway?

If you don't mind paying a large setup fee, you can get a a fairly stacked dual opteron server from gnax for $159 a month.
Click to expand...

Hmm sorry about that - didn't mean to be so vague.

I'd say high useage (for a shared server!) is about 100,000 hits per day. A couple of the sites I host do this, and they use around 500 Mb bandwidth per day on average. Most of the other sites have inbetween 40,000 to 80,000 hits per day.

The thing is they regularly get massive influxes of traffic due to advertising, and I want to be able to cope with that.

I'm wanting to use ClamAV and Spamassassin. Current email usage is not that easy to say right now - about 50 or so mail per day per account. That's rather guessed, but the best I can do at the moment!

I was hoping there would be some sort of guidlines to show what spec would be sufficient for the servers needs.

What hardware have you got, and what are you hosting on it?

Thanks
 
I have older servers. Dual P IIIs with hardware rais 5 arrays. I host about 500 sites on each. Almost 90% of these are all low traffic. It is just enough.


I think you should really consider a Dual Opteron 242s with 3GB and scsi raid 1. From your numbers it would seem like you would be doing about 4 million + hits a day. That is a lot. Having dual proccessors gives you some headroom for your ad campaigns. You may also want to consider getting 2 P4 servers and splitting your clients up.
 
And I think you're talking way overkill.

Our P4 2.8G servers with one gig of memory and RAID 1 SATA drives absolutely loaf on such loads.

Jeff
 
"Our P4 2.8G servers with one gig of memory and RAID 1 SATA drives absolutely loaf on such loads."

I'm not sure how you can assume this since we really don't know what the user is running. I doubt a p4 2.8 would be loafing if it was doing mysql, jsp, php and asp at the same time. No doubt properly configured it can handle a boatload of activity and serving.

Since some of his high activity clients run ad campaigns what if suddenly the server was doing 15 million hits and 400 mysql queries per minute for a long sustained period?

For a few bucks more a month I'd rather have overkill, but that is me.
I would rather load balance 2 p4s, but the whole mysql thing can be a drag. Either way a good config and tweaking will make all the difference.
 
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