I'm building a couple of VPS host servers for a client.
Each server have to host 20 VPS and each server will be 4 cores with 32GB of ram. So CPU and ram should be just fine, my interrogatioon now is hard drives. The company owns the machines, but not the drives yet.
I searched a lot on your forums but found nothing relating on VPS. I'm basicly a DBA IRL, so I have experience in hardrives when it comes to databases, but it's completely different for VPS.
According to my boss, each VPS will run a LAMP solution (having a separeted DB cluster is out of question for some reason).
First, raid1 is indeed a must. There is room for 2x 3.5 drives. I might be able to change the backplane for 4x2.5, but i'm not sure...
I've came to several solutions: 2x SATA 7.2k => comes to about 140$ 2x SATA 10k (velociraptor) => comes to about 500$ 2x SAS 10k with PCIe controller => comes to about 850$ 2x SAS 15k with PCIe controller=> comes to about 1000$
They need at least 300GB storage.
But my problem is that the servers do not have SAS onboard so I need a controller and in my case the cheapest solution is best.
But I'm not sure that SATA 7.2k will hold the charge of 20 complete VPS.
Does it worth it to go with SAS anyway or SATA should be just fine? With SATA better use plain old sata 7.2k or 10k drives?
That's a lot of text for not much: What is best for VPS: SATA 7.2k, SATA 10k or SAS 10k?
Do the old RLX Blade servers use 'mini' hard drives? I can't find an answer anywhere. I seem to recall that they use smaller 2.5" drives. Is this the case?
And, if so, do they make "good" drives worthy of being in a server in that size? Are they essentially just a laptop drive?
I am in a little bit of trouble I got a couple (5) of 750GB hdds that I need backed up to another couple (5?) of 750GB hdds so I can save the data storage on them. They are in a Linux box with a LVM setup I also have a RAID ware card on it but not using any RAID # on them. I decided after finding out what I could do with it to go to Windows 2003 on the server and installing RAID5/6 on it.
It seems that I will have to give up all my data and have everything wiped off from the hard drives this is very sad for me but I still have a chance to save the data on them. So I am thinking of copying them to another bunch of hard drives and then re-add it once the system is in place.
I was looking at this [url]
But thats clearly too expensive as I just need to back up 5 hard drives (750GB/each) and just need to do it one time. Anyone have any suggestions to this or how should I go about doing it. It doesnt have to be right away but its good to know my options.
Is there any place where they might to do this kind of stuff they let you rent their machine for a couple of hours for a fee so you can back up your data? The server is a COLO and the hardware is mine so I have every right to take it off and back it up with no problem from the datacenter.
am getting new server with 2 (73GB) hard drives i need to know the following:
1.I need to put /home in one hard drive 73GB and the other partitions like /boot, /tmp,/usr and /var on the other drive
where should i put /home? on the primary or or secondary drive?is there any effect on the speed?
2. Am used to servers with 1 drive. is there any difference when it comes to security aplications such as APF,BFD,mod security and other aplicatuions settings?
3. in general should i take the same actions when handling a server with 1 drive and server with 2 drives?
/dev/md0: ext3 mounted as / for all of the software RAID partitions.
I was left to believe this would create redundancy as long as only one drive is removed from the array. Although when I unplug any of the hard drives (one at a time) I get input/output errors and when I try to reboot I get kernel sync errors.
What exactly am I doing wrong when trying to create redundancy? I know that SDA contains the /boot/ partition so it wouldn't boot without that but even if I unplug B,C, and D it still can't sync.
I want to try something different on our methods of replacing or upgrading hard drives.
I want to be able to do most of it via our KVM/IP instead of babysitting the server(s) for so long in the DC.
My thoughts are, how can I add the new hard drive in the DC, and move the data over via the KVM/IP. Can this be done with just a raw drive added (no new setup) using DD or even rsync, or is it better to setup a new installation of CentOS on the new drive, and use rsync to move the data over. Then how do I get the proper drive to boot until I go back into the DC to remove the bad or old drive? I'd be interested in how some of you folks are doing this, as far as what's easiest and could be done over the KVM/IP once the new drive is connected.
Or on systems that have 2 drives with cPanel/WHM, how can we temporarily on an emergency basis untilize the backup drive to do a new setup, copy the data over from the drive that is failing, then just replace the bad drive as a backup drive next time you go in the DC? We have an external USB CD in place to allow remote installs...just curious if anyone does something like this or has ideas how we could make this work.
We use cloning software now, but can end up babysitting a clone for a long period in the DC like this.
Mountain View (CA) - As a company with one of the world's largest IT infrastructures, Google has an opportunity to do more than just search the Internet. From time to time, the company publishes the results of internal research. The most recent project one is sure to spark interest in exploring how and under what circumstances hard drives work - or not.
There is a rule of thumb for replacing hard drives, which taught customers to move data from one drive to another at least every five years. But especially the mechanical nature of hard drives makes these mass storage devices prone to error and some drives may fail and die long before that five-year-mark is reached. Traditionally, extreme environmental conditions are cited as the main reasons for hard drive failure, extreme temperatures and excessive activity being the most prominent ones.
A Google study presented at the currently held Conference on File and Storage Technologies questions these traditional failure explanations and concludes that there are many more factors impacting the life expectancy of a hard drive and that failure predictions are much more complex than previously thought. What makes this study interesting is the fact that Google's server infrastructure is estimated to exceed a number of 450,000 fairly mainstream systems that, in a large number, use consumer-grade devices with capacities ranging from 80 to 400 GB in capacity. According to the company, the project covered "more than 100,000" drives that were put into production in or after 2001. The drives ran at a platter rotation speed of 5400 and 7200 rpm, came from "many of the largest disk drive manufacturers and from at least nine different models."
Google said that it is collecting "vital information" about all of its systems every few minutes and stores the data for further analysis. For example, this information includes environmental factors (such as temperatures), activity levels and SMART parameters (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that are commonly considered to be good indicators to describe the health of disk drives.
In general, Google's hard drive population saw a failure rate that was increasing with the age of the drive. Within the group of hard drives up to one year old, 1.7% of the devices had to be replaced due to failure. The rate jumps to 8% in year 2 and 8.6% in year 3. The failure rate levels out thereafter, but Google believes that the reliability of drives older than 4 years is influenced more by "the particular models in that vintage than by disk drive aging effects."
Breaking out different levels of utilization, the Google study shows an interesting result. Only drives with an age of six months or younger show a decidedly higher probability of failure when put into a high activity environment. Once the drive survives its first months, the probability of failure due to high usage decreases in year 1, 2, 3 and 4 - and increases significantly in year 5. Google's temperature research found an equally surprising result: "Failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend," the authors of the study found.
In contrast the company discovered that certain SMART parameters apparently do have an effect drive failures. For example, drives typically scan the disk surface in the background and report errors as they discover them. Significant scan errors can hint to surface errors and Google reports that fewer than 2% of its drives show scan errors. However, drives with scan errors turned out to be ten times more likely to fail than drives without scan errors. About 70% of Google's drives with scan errors survived the first eight months after the first scan error was reported.
Similarly, reallocation counts, a number that results from the remapping of faulty sectors to a new physical sector, can have a dramatic impact on a hard drive's life: Google said that drives with one or more reallocations fail more often than those with none. The observed average impact on the average fail rate came in at a factor of 3-6, while about 85% of the drives survive past eight months after the first reallocation.
Google discovered similar effects on hard drives in other SMART categories, but them bottom line revealed that 56% of all failed drives had no count in either one of these categories - which means that more than half of all failed drives were put out of operation by factors other than scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation and probational counts.
In the end, Google's research does not solve the problem of predicting when hard drives are likely to fail. However, it shows that temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances. The report lacks a clear cut conclusion, but the authors indicate that there is no promising approach at this time than can predict failures of hard drives: "Powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART."
I just got an additional 500GB hard drive added and mounted it to /home2
There are files that are in /home1 (orginal HD) that will need to be constantly moved over to /home2 via a ftp
But i keep getting this error
550 Rename/move failure: Invalid cross-device link
Does anyone have any ideas? I tried changing permissions but no luck also tried mounting the 2nd hard drive within a directory in /home1. Still gives the error.
Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.
Is there a way to use ns1/ns2.yourhostdomain.com for not only your shared hosting clients but also for your linux AND windows 2003 dedicated server clients (or vps)?
Just wondering what is your preference when choosing a vendor based server as a provider? Do you go with Dell? HP? IBM? Or another vendor to offer to your customers? What are your reasons for using the brand you do?
I'm going to be hosting my clients websites and I was wondering how to calculate how much bandwidth / space I should make available to clients and also how much to charge for hosting / maintenance.
I am a front end designer/developer with no server-side expertise. I am probably going to have to provide hosting to my freelance clients very soon. These would be small WP sites with low traffic, but there could be as many as 50 domains being hosted at a time just to begin with.
I need the host provider to do all the tech work and provide support to me, if not to the clients (who will inevitable contact me to deal with problems, which is OK). I am not able to manage/troubleshoot my own server.
I am considering Mosso/Rackspace, but recently I've heard some very negative comments on forums (such as this one) that are concerning me.
Does anyone have a recommendation given my needs and experience level with servers/hosting? I am not looking for a "cheap deal" - I need reliable service and peace of mind.
I'm in the process of forming a web development business and am currently interested in learning the various methods of offering 3rd party services and accounts. How to offer hosting is my current dilemma; I can of course refer the client to a host and receive a referral kick-back, but the idea of reselling hosting accounts is also appealing, though I have no knowledge currently as to how this works, and I'm basically just curious how other's manage this aspect of the business. I do not mind offering customer service on hosting accounts, so this is not an issue
I currently own a reasonably sized VPS paying around 40/$80 a month for it. I am extremely happy with the service but I have recently move from freelance to being hired by a company.
I wish to scale down my costs so looking at other options.
I hear a lot (mostly good) of things about MT and was wondering what peoples experiences are - particular with ease of use, support and uptime.
I would also like to know about how the normal shared hosting option works for people hosting some clients website and email. I currently have around 10 clients hosting with me and 100 emails. Is it easy for clients to use and i assume pop and imap are supported.
I currently run my VPS on cpanel. would it be easy to transfer everything or is it very much of a manual job?
it looks like dell sell sas mainly without scsi now, with high load server,scsi and sas will better than sata, but the price of sas is higher a lot, i want to ask if you use sas hdd to run your hosting server? and if it is worth to use sas now?
I have noticed that resellers traffic stats (looks like email) are not being updated and just show 0.
On the server that is for resellers I see there is a file in /usr/local/psa/var/log containing a file mail_traffic_pendings.dat with sender and recipient domain traffic. I presume this has to be processed to go into the database, but obviously it is not. How to debug this issue so that email stats get updated for clients.
It seems to me storage space on dedicated hosts has stalled. Why is it that most dedicated hosts are still on 250 GB drives when 500 GB and 1000 GB drives are now standard?
I have a couple of Dell 1950s and in one of them, I have 2x Seagate 15K.5s that I purchased through Dell and I also have a spare sitting in my rack in case one goes bad, also from Dell.
I was going to be repurposing one of my other 1950s and was going to get two more 15K.5s for it, but wasn't planning on getting them through Dell (rip off?). This way, could still keep the same spare drive around in case a drive went bad in that system as well.
When I was talking to my Dell rep recently when purchasing another system, their hardware tech said you can't use non-Dell drives with Dell drives in the same RAID array because of the different firmware between them.
Anyone know if it is true? Anyone have any experience with using drives from Dell in conjunction with the same model drives from a third party retailer?
I'm trying to find at least three web hosting companies to choose from to host a Joomla websites on a shared server. Would consider dedicated if the deal was right. I have a friend of mine who wants to create a church website, and is looking for the best deal. I use Netfirms which I have never had an issue with, but I didn't want to be bias, and would like give him other options to choose from.
Is there a good WebHosting Review site, I could check out, or maybe someone could recommend their top three. I reading threw the forums here and I noticed there are not that many complaints with Hostgator. Again, I just want to see if there was anything out there better.
This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?
Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.
So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:
1. Who will be managing these sites?
2. How important is site security between sites?
3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.
1. Who will be managing these site?
If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.
When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.
2. How important is site security between sites?
This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.
If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.
Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.
The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.
3. Will these domains need SSLs?
As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.
Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.
Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?
It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.
If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.
But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.
If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.
The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have. ----------------------------------------------------------------------