After speaking to a colleague about some major benefits of EC2 for on-demand hosting I've been very interested in learning more.
I've spent the past 2 evenings trolling through Amazon Doc's and blog posts and have a fair assessment about how things work but I'm at a stopping point.
There doesn't seem to be a dedicated EC2 area here on Sitepoint and the Amazon EC2 forums seem geared more towards 'advanced' users.
Are there any reliable communities that are more for the beginner?
I've got a LAMP webserver Instance running on EC2 but I'm very unclear about how to login and begin adding files and managing the data. I'm sure it's pretty simple but the documentation pretty much loses me when they start discussing Security Groups and public/private keys.
I'm not much of a server admin but have grown pretty comfortable on our FC4 dedicated boxes that we currently host on.
I'd like to start an ongoing thread here listing the 'Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support'. In other words, out of the 1,000s of host companies, this may cut it down to less than a dozen.
( And for all you Hosters out there who really want your company to grow, and want to know how, - it's easy: just read here.)
Good telephone support is the #1 ultimate requirement, because:
-It's a lot faster and easier for both the user and the host company, because you can state and answer all questions and clarifications on the spot, you don't need to continually pass new emails with new questions and clarifications, back and forth for days on end, until the issue is solved. It saves tech time and user's time. And saves a lot of nerves.
- It's the best way to sort the good guys from the bad. A bad company isn't going to bother to answer the phone, - or will make you wait way too long, - because they are likely getting endless complaints. The good guys are always ready to answer the phones, with a friendly voice, - because they really WANT to please the customer.
- If a company can't be bothered to pick up the phone, we can't be bothered to even consider them. They're a joke, and so won't be listed here on this thread. (So, before adding or listing any Hosters here, please verfify that they do have Good, quick, friendly, telephone support,; ideally 24/7, but 9am to 10pm might be acceptable, if it was supplemented by some emergency contact. AND:
- Hoster ALSO needs good EMAIL support (and preferably, Chat online, extended hour availability). (I spend a lot of time overseas). It sems all emails should get a non-automated response within about an hour, - and then support should jump on fixing any problem.
I only need support a few times a year. To answer some questions, or fix a problem, or do an install. That's lesss than 1 hour total, so any company paying maybe $18/hour tech support should be able to handle this. It IS reasonable to charge a custm for extended calls, beyond say, 90minutes a year, IF you don't count the 80%? Of times an issue is the Hoster;s fault of stmg gone wrong, and don't count the 'hold' times.
ALSO IMPORTANT: - Uptime - site Speeds - Monthly plans, no contract (Only a dishonest host will try to force you into a contract, where they can then ignore you.) - Reasonable price. (? Maybe $12 to $18/month for a basic business site. We don't need massive bandwitdths, - we all know that's an overselling scam, and can't ever be delivered.) - a good upgrade plan of bigger options. Maybe even VPS. - Dedicated IP, and availbility of SSL -PHP 5, mysql, phpMyAdmin, etc - cPanel ( Some Hosts are using problematic panels, like Hsphere, which are slow to load, slow in operation, require many more clicks, have too many options, spread apart on many separate pages. Time is money, and this really slows down the ability of a small business to manage his own site in effective time. For example, one WHT user wrote somewhere: "I don't feel that HSphere's interface is nice at all, although I have worked with cPanel and DA all my life... I just found it to include un-necessary features or split features up in to different hard to find pages, such as backups - mysql backups you had to find on a completely different page than file backups, and then there were options to have it in the home directory or server-end backup, in which then you had to wait a good 10 minutes before it was ready. cPanel, just hit backup and hit download and instantly it does everything you need...".
I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone support, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far: - Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes! - NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest. - MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere. - Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere. - JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work..... - Hostgator. Yes, it's a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support. - ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered... - Can anyone add to this list? Please list only hosts that meet the above minimum requirements of phone support, etc. Especially useful is hosters you've tried. TO AVOID: - Avoid Arvixe. I had a horrid experience with them, here: [WHT forum]:/showthread.php?p=5097822#post5097822 - Avoid WebHostingBuzz. This company never returned my phone msessage inquiries.
I am sending out an email blast to about 30000 addresses when I leave. Because this is the down-time for our site, is it possible to temporarily give Exim more resources to help process? Or would this even be beneficial?
If both questions answer yes, please let me know where I should look for instructions on doing this.
It takes up pretty much 90-95% of the cpu and memory at times if I do not kill the process. But even after I kill the process it comes back and immediately hogs up cpu load again causing it to go into loads of 8.00 or higher ( I have 8cpus ).
I'm guessing it's a no but if I start a VPS and it starts to eat ram or I think it needs more CPU can I just increase it? I'm talking about using OpenVZ.
We've just started to use a VPS, and so far no problems I've been looking at the resources and they seem a little high considering it's pretty much out of the box, and I've only setup 4 sites which aren't even public yet. The only thing I've changed is the php.ini to increase the memory limit to 32mb. My main concern is that these sites don't suffer when they go live.
In the Plesk control panel the memory says: 3.8 GB of 3.8 GB used; 47.1 MB available The 47.1mb is pretty much average, although I've seen it go as low as 115mb.
In Virtuozzo the system usage (resource: capacity) is usually around 60-75%
Both of these seem a little high, but I'm not sure if these readings are for the whole physical server, or just my portion of it.
Also in the (Virtuozzo) QoS alerts I've had quite a few Yellow zone, black zone and one red zone reports, at around 5am - quite possibly the quietest time on a server which isn't hosting any live sites yet. These have both been on the numproc and the privvmpages services (the red zone was one the privvmpages). Is there anything I should be looking at or is this fairly normal operation for a VPS? I have nightly backups scheduled for around 1am. These were originally set for 4am, but reports were showing that they were running out of memory, so Ive now staggered the times of these to see if that helps. I've haven't changed anything resource-wise other than the php, so I thought it would be good to go from the start, but maybe it needs some fine tuning.
I am running CPanel/WHM as well as the WHMSonic plugin for a Shoutcast service. Now the thing is that my RAM limit is 4GB, but my RAM usage is always at around 3.5GB and above.
I guess it's mainly due to WHMSonic, so is there any way i could lower this RAM as on multiple occasions the server has locked up and shutdown,rebooted or had to be rebooted.
On top of that, the server load is around 10.00 or above.
Is there a resource controlling script which i could install?
I have seen some requests for cheap Virtual Private Servers. By saying "cheap" I mean under $20/month... However the those who posted the requests meant under $10/month...
I don't think that a virtual machine or container would cost $10 or less, but I've seen some providers to offer virtual servers with a very small amount of resources - a couple gigs of space, not to much bandwidth and 64 MB or 128 MB RAM - and to price them around 10 bucks per month.
Although I'd never go this way I'm curious to read what do you thin about such a marketing policy. Do you think that offering a VPS which can not even have a control panel because it doesn't have enough resources is a good practice? (I realize that there are different scenarios and some people probably don't need hosting automation software, but at the same time need a low cost virtual machine...)
I got a dedicated server running, which is administered by DirectAdmin, which I mainly use as a mysql server. Now my question would be, what would I do to give all resources possible to mySQL? I mean I donīt wanna take down directadmin and setup mySQL only, so I want to keep directadmin but give almost all server resources to mySQL?
What I did so far is adjust all tables, do indexes and stuff.
The background is that at certain times I face server loads of 40 caused by many external servers of mine querying the mySQL database on the server I am talking about.
So while the load is mainly below 0.1 it sometimes goes up to 40. So this peak I wanna slow down a little bit by giving all resources to mySQL. To say that beforehand splitting the queries from external servers is not an option - they all need to be done at the same time.
So I would really be interested and thankful in what you would advice to do to optimize the mySQL service?
I have a VPS where i have cpanel installed. I have noticed quite a number of times through my WHM Cpu/Memory usage that there are 3 instances of MRTG and they seem to be taking up a lot of resources.
I did not install mrtg and i don't even know how do i go ahead and view them
Can someone tell me how do i remove them and is it just me or are there actually 3 instances of MRTG running for everyone?
I am thinking about creating my own search engine and I was wondering what some basic server hardware would be required to do this (e.g., RAM, hard drives, memory, storage space). Would I have to run a minimum of 1TB on storage and 4 to 6GB of ram to do it right?
a few times, my host contacted me and said that my account is suspended due to high usage of server resources.
I have 3 sites using SMF (a forum script.) I have around 8500 visitors and 3 million page views per month in total.
can this be a reason of high usage?
if it's what's the meaning of terabyte traffic limit ? which you can never use
I asked to my host if they could let me know what's causing high server resources usage. here is the answer:
We do not know which domain or script caused this high usage, it is your responsibility to investigate. I would suggest that you go through your raw access logs to see the most requested pages and then investigate those further. After you find the pages responsible, please optimize them so you are not using so many server resources.
so if a host wants simply to restrict traffic limit, they have a pre-reason under hand.high server usage! yes but how will I know that? how will I trust that it's true?
when I ask why my sites are down, they can easily tell me that it's because of high server usage!
if there were any free resources out there that anyone know's of that could teach someone how to manage an unmanaged dedicated server? General guides will do but the more specific the better although I really cannot imagine a guide specific to my requirements but anyway
Quote:
Fedora core 6 with WHM and Cpanel
Where do people learn this stuff without having to take a course in it?
I have an idea for a social network that could attract something like 100.000 niche users and maybe more. What kind of hardware requirements would that take to accomodate properly? I wouldn't want to cause a diminishing of the userexperience with slow loadtimes etc.
My Problem is that I can't run webstats or my RAM maxes out causing all kinds of problems. Normally my privvmpages is around 200,000 out of an allocation of 500,000 but with webstats on that goes through the roof.
What can I do? Do I have to get more RAM? I can buy more ram but it is kind of pricey.
Would switching to Plesk solve my problem? I heard it uses less resources. But I have never used it before.
How can I limit my dedicated server's resources ? For example, one of reseller provider's limits :
Quote:
Resellers may not use more than 2% CPU daily, 3% memory daily, run more than 10 simultaneous processes per user, allow any process to run for longer than 30 seconds CPU time, run any process that consumes more than 20% of available CPU at any time, or run any process that consumes more than 16 MB of memory. Databases are limited to 16 max user connections with a max query time of 8 seconds. Cron jobs must not execute more than once every 15 minutes and will be niced to 15 or greater.
