I have a vps that has used over 400GB of bandwidth (uaually uses about 80gb if that!) as monitored by hyper vm. The vps keeps maxing out with high mysql usage and http. The server has 756mb ram and 40% cpu of a dual core e6600.
I have apf installed and have done these [url]hacked and the securing the vps thread on this forum. The only way I can keep it server up and stop it maxing out with with a band aid fix of restarting mysql and https every hour via a cron! (nice!)
I have a script that runs when the server goes over a limit here is the output any suggestions would be appreciated.
Load average Crossed allowed limit.
Local Date & Time : Fri Apr 18 12:28:03 UTC 2008
| Uptime status: |
-------------------------------------------
12:28:03 up 1 day, 26 min, 0 users, load average: 8.84, 5.85, 3.15
-------------------------------------------
| Top 20 CPU consuming processes: |
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
nobody 15565 10.6 1.0 35192 10868 ? R 12:25 ............
I've been meaning to get around to this for quite some time now, and since I've got some free time I figured I'd review NearlyFreeSpeech.net
Length of time with host: 4+ years Sites hosted: 5 (+/-)
Basically, I couldn't be happier. They're pretty much everything that shared hosting should be. They don't oversell. They don't sell your information to advertisers. And they've got several "killer features" that few (if any) other hosts offer.
Pros
Performance
Unlike some (most?) shared hosts, they don't cram a bunch of sites onto the same server. In fact, they don't even assign you a server per se. All sites are hosted on clusters, so the most active sites will be handled by several servers working in tandem. The load balancing is automatic transparent -- if your site starts getting a load of traffic, their servers will shift your site around as necessary to ensure that it remains responsive. This process isn't noticable at all; every aspect of their service feels like a traditional shared hosting setup, the sole exception being that performance doesn't suck. Wordpress and phpBB (notorious for bringing most shared hosting plans to their knees) feel snappy and responsive, even when faced with large amounts of traffic.
Reliability
They're not perfect, but they're close. I've used several other shared hosts over the years, and I can safely say that NFSN is the most reliable of all of the ones that I've used. Again, I think this has to do with their clustering setup. I've never been told "sorry, but someone on your server crashed Apache". They do get hit with DDoS attacks from time to time (as do all hosts), but it's exceptionally rare for said attacks to cause a disruption of service. When large scale attacks do occur, they handle them quickly and professionally. There have been a handful of large-scale failures over the time I've been with them, but disruptions of service are few and far between.
Language Support
Pretty damn good. I'd say they're best at hosting PHP/MySQL sites, but they're very, very good with all of their officially supported CGI languages [url] too. They'll also install libraries, PEAR modules, etc. upon request, even if it's something that nobody other than you will ever use.
Support
Support is second-to-none. Support is conducted via their administrative control panel. Although they do have official hours, it's not unusual to have your question answered quickly even at some ungodly hour of the morning. All the support staff are top-notch, and they all *definitely* know their stuff. They don't hand-hold as much as most hosts, but if you're reasonably competent and/or not afraid to learn you won't have any trouble. They've also got a panic button feature that I quite like -- from their write-up about the feature:
After you hit the panic button, a ticket will be opened at "Panic" priority including the text of your message. The on-call admin will also be immediately paged with the text of your message. Then, one of three things will happen:
-If you hit the panic button for a legitimate, previously-unreported system or network outage that needs our immediate attention, we will change your issue to "High" priority, refund your panic message charge, and cut the cost of your next panic message in half.
-If your message does not pertain to a legitimate problem or outage that needs our immediate attention, we will change your issue to "Standard" priority, you will not receive a panic message refund, and the cost of your next panic message will be doubled.
-If your message is clearly spurious ("Haha lolz I paged u!") it will be ignored and your ability to send panic messages will be revoked. You will not receive a panic message refund.
Free speech / censorship
Hands down, they make other hosts look like jokes. I've managed several controversial sites over the last four years, and NearlyFreeSpeech.net is the ONLY host who hasn't hassled me.
The best thing I can do to promote their service is to point you to their beliefs ([url] page. Yep. No mission statements... just three simple quotes. And they really do believe in those values.
They even go as far as to say this in their FAQ:
You must obey all applicable local laws unless you get our prior express consent in writing. We do provide anonymous hosting of content that violates local government censorship laws at our sole discretion in cases outside the United States where we feel government censorship is contrary to the cause of freedom.
Quite a departure from most shared hosts. Even more (and yes, I speak from experiene when I say that they really do hold to this):
A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site is defaming me or otherwise injuring me civilly.
Please forward a copy of your legal finding from a court of competent jurisdiction to our contact address. If you have not yet obtained such a finding, a preliminary injunction or court order is also sufficient.
If you are not able to obtain the above, you will need to work directly with the site operator to resolve your differences. We will have to fall back on our members' contractual assertion that the content they upload is legitimate and therefore we will not be able to get involved.
This quote really sums up their stance:
A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site contains offensive content.
At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET we firmly believe that censorship is a dangerous and misguided approach to the problems of society. We believe that the price we pay for the huge number of fantastic sites we host are a few sites that we feel are significantly less fantastic.
We believe that the price you pay for living in what we hope is a free society is that when you encounter something offensive, you must resist the urge to censor it and instead research, investigate, and speak out passionately in opposition to it. That is the essence of free speech.
Please do not send us abuse complaints of this nature. We will discard them. DMCA
Ah yes. Everyone's favorite. Fortunately, NFS is sane about this (far more sane than some uh... "dreamy" hosts I've used...). Again, another excerpt from their FAQ (which I can also attest is true):
We adhere to the entire law very closely. We do not generally pull the plug on an entire site if, for example, someone claims that a single graphic is infringing. We do our best to remove only the content that the copyright owner specifically identifies as allegedly infringing. We allow and encourage the use of the "putback notification" process when material is incorrectly identified as infringing. But we do not automatically terminate a member's service merely for receiving a complaint alleging infringement. (However, actually infringing someone's copyright does violate our TACOS and will generally result in immediate termination.)
Keep in mind that while we aren't lawyers, neither are we idiots. We can tell the difference between people harassing our members via the DMCA and cases where our service is genuinely being misused, and we can adjust our attitude accordingly. Fortunately, both of these cases are very rare. Cost.
This one's a big issue for folks on shared hosting, so it's worth going over. Basically, NFSN uses a pay-per-use model. Simply put, you pay for the resources you use. This does mean that you won't be able to "game the system" and hope to get away with a high-traffic site on an oversold server for a couple bucks a month. This also means that the system won't game you, and put your high traffic site on an oversold server. Most importantly, it means that you don't pay for what you don't use. Those 1000GB for $10 plans seem like a great idea until you realize that if you only use 1GB you're getting royally screwed.
Pricing is a little unconventional, so it's worth going over in a bit of depth:
Bandwidth
Bandwidth starts at the price of $1/GB. This may seem steep if you compare them to the prices promised in the ads of various heavily-oversold shared hosts. Fortunately, it's not a flat rate. In fact, the more bandwidth you use, the lower your per-GB charge is --and the discount is permanent. They've got a bandwidth calculator [url] if you're curious about pricing.
Storage
$1/100MB, flat fee.
MySQL
$0.01/day IIRC. Their MySQL servers are top notch FreeBSD 7 boxes, and I definitely think they're worth the price.
E-mail forwarding
$0.01/day. You can obviously use your own e-mail servers instead, or use something like Google Apps -- but if you want them to do e-mail forwarding it costs $0.01/day with no usage cap. (And yes, I do mean no usage cap. Bugmenot.com uses NFS's e-mail servers for their "disposable mailbox" service, and they have a heck of a lot of inbound mail.) Privacy
Wow. Short of bribing an off-shore host, I don't think you'll find a more private arrangement. Unless they've got a court order demanding your details, you can safely assume that they won't be divulged. Again, I speak from experience.
Also interesting to note is this excerpt from their FAQs:
At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, we believe that with great power comes great responsibility, so we take a dim view of such behavior. For that reason, our TACOS require our members to provide complete and correct contact information, and requests for anonymous hosting are typically denied.
However, we do make one important exception. If you live outside the United States and can demonstrate that the site you wish to host would put you at significant, legitimate risk of retaliation from a government with a documented track record of reprisal against people who speak out against it, we may be able to help. Anonymous hosting is serious business; it can be one component of a coordinated plan to protect you and your family from torture and murder. It's absolutely not an option you can use to dodge lawsuits or unpopularity arising from hosted material.
I haven't (thankfully) had to depend on that level of privacy protection -- but if I did, I wouldn't hesitate to work with them.
SFTP/SSH access
Name says it all.
Scalability
To quote 'jdw', one of the founders of the service, in response to a user's questions re: scalability:
It depends. If all you need is bandwidth, it should be pretty well unlimited. There have been a couple of cases where we have asked people to move on based on CPU usage, but those involved specific situations where they had a poorly-tuned application and couldn’t or wouldn’t optimize it for the load they were getting. Those were also before the days of 8-core cluster nodes.
A VPS or single dedicated server would definitely not be able to serve more bandwidth. Most of them are capped to 10 or 100Mbps; our load-sharing architecture can serve a single site into multiple Gbps if the site is fast enough (i.e. static content) and you can pay for it.
When they mention CPU usage, it's worth noting that it's nothing like Dreamhost and other shared hosts. You just won't hit it unless you've got a bug or you're trying to do something like calculate pi to a billion places. The limits that are in place are solely to prevent runaway/buggy apps from screwing things up -- you won't hit them, even with heavy usage, provided your site's software is functioning correctly.
Cons:
To be honest, there aren't many. There are some though, so in the interest of completeness, here they are:
No SSL
The reasons for this are varied, and they're actively working to implement a solution. The short story is that, due to the architecture of their service, it's not quite as simple as "drop in a cert and tweak the httpd config". Essentially, since they don't assign static IPs for individual sites, they can't support SSL until all mainstream browsers support the SNI extension.
No overselling
Some people may think the lack of "unlimited bandwidth for $7.99/mo" is a con. Others think "unlimited bandwidth for $7.99/mo" is a con. Depends on your perspective and usage I guess.
No Ruby on Rails
Doesn't bother me, but it might be a deal-breaker for someone I suppose.
Not your bog-standard cPanel + Linux box setup Some folks would say that this is a con, due to the lack of familiarity. Their control panel is different than a lot of hosts, but it's flexible, clean, and responsive, so it's fine for me.
Perks
One thing I've come to notice over 4+ years with NFS is that there are lots and lots of nice little features that aren't advertised, but that make life just a little easier.
Examples:
E-mail to POST
Their mail forwarding can be configured to POST incoming messages (complete with attachments) to a specified URL. The format of this submission is documented on the member wiki.
Member wiki
Contains member-submitted documentation of NFSN's quirks, some of its special features, and how to best get different apps working on NFSN.
Management API
I haven't played around with it, so I can't provide too many details, but NearlyFreeSpeech offers a public API to allow for the programmatic management of user memberships, sites, DNS records, etc. Pretty cool, and not something I've seen elsewhere.
Domain registration
Cheap domains, simple registration process, and (unlike GoDaddy) they don't screw around with your registration just because you said something that they didn't like. Haskell support
If you know what this is, you know why this is sweet ;-)
Member forums
Not terribly unique, but a great resource. Pretty much everyone there is quite friendly and happy to help new users.
Free trial
You can create a trial membership. This membership comes with $0.02 (IIRC) credit, and is a great way to tinker with their platform before depositing money. You can get a refund
Sweet. Never had to use it though, but good to know I could if I had to.
Humor
A little thing, yes -- but it's good to see a host that actually seems like it's staffed by real people rather than bash scripts and stock photos.
Member/staff interaction
This is something I haven't seen with any other hosts. The staff interact with the users on the discussion forums. When a user asks "why do you do/say X", they get a response. They have discussions on why they decided to do/say X. Members ask for Y to be available through the web control panel, and some time later a staff member bumps the thread to point out that Y has been implemented. --- Verdict If you need shared hosting, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not trying NearlyFreeSpeech.net
the FTP was goosed on a personal server before and I was on my way out with the bitch, so I decided to get PSM to sort it out for me.
Came back about 5 - 6 hours later and it hadnt been fixed. No problem though as I would just do it myself. Anyway just as I logged into SSH to get it done, they did it, cheers.
I wanted something enabling on the FTP at the request of a friend but wanted to watch some TV and as I can't seem to use the laptop and watch TV at the same time nowadays, decided to get PSM to do it (its only to enable resume on the FTP, so its a simple request).
Anyway to cut the story short, the ticket was submitted 6 hours 33 minutes ago and still no response. I wont do it myself now as I want to see how long it takes them to respond, it will be interesting as they have already failed to meet their 6 hour response guarantee.
Other then tonight I can't fault PSM, whenever I use them (which to be honest is maybe once every 5 months or so) they are great and usually very speedy, but tonight its just sooooo slow, its really unusual. Anyone else noticedc this slowness tonight?
How do you handle your mega space requirements for your high-use databases? Do any of you work with storage in the terabytes? If so, what kind of hardware and setup do you use?
Do you just have many commodity servers with maybe 100GB or so in each, or do you have some kind of shared RAID array set up? Or some kind of SAN?
Keep in mind I'm not talking about network storage (i.e. slow, personal use, file server) but rather high-speed intensive high-read/high-write database requirements.
What are the options for implementing such a solution?
What types of products fit such requirements? Could you comment on what things to look for when purchasing such a set of products?
Does anyone know the secret behind the server configuration of the big boys in hosting who offer as much as 1.5TB webspace and $15TB bandwidth or even unlimited for less than $10/month? I want to offer such a high webspace at less than $10/month too.
I want to know the exact server configuration in terms of hard drives/accessories that can make this possible and very reliable data centers where I can co-locate the servers with unmetered bandwidth too.
The estimated cost of the hard drives/accessories and any other associated costs should be stated clearly.Linux/Unix platforms preferred.The DC should be ready to do the configuration and the cost would not leave a serious dent on my financial resources.
How will I assign the bandwidth for a VE in virtuozzo power panel. I could not find any fileds that corresponds to bandwidth in the steps during creation. I could find how to restrict memory(vmguarpages) and disk space. But where will I assign the bandwidth that a VE can use.
Now I keep very close tabs on my site stats. Just tonight one of my sites suddenly showed 167gb for "traffic not viewed".
That was a jump from 5gb over the course of a day.
That was done in 604877 pages and 607138 hits.
Can someone explain to me what "traffic not viewed" actually is within AWSTATS.
Next I located where most of the bw went and it appears to be http code 206 showing 159gb. My latest visitor report for the addon domain only showed one ip with an odd couple direct requests. The referring site was my own cpanel but registered to a ip in India.
How can i locate where the leak is, latest visitors isn't being much help, I have since denied the india ip which i suspect was the problem maker. How can I prevent instances such as this in the future? Being a streaming video site I have the bw to spare but it is still a bit un-nerving. Now on top of everything Virtuozzo isn't showing anything of the sort, what do i believe?
I like the LSN server company and have a server there that I plan to keep forever, they do a great job just that I am confused about their bandwidth. Also the prices aren’t exact!
Just wondering what everyone else here thinks about this:
So... LSN are doing a Q9300 server at the moment for $130 “ish” with 2TB of bandwidth. Now let’s say someone wants an extra 0.5TB of bandwidth they pay around $50 for it and if they want 1TB they pay about $95.
So you buy a server for $130 and get 2TB of bandwidth and also the costs of the hardware, space, power is covered for the hardware. Yet they charge nearly the same price for 1TB extra to a single server, which uses no extra space, hardware or power. Another thing is they charge $25 server to pool the bandwidth between your servers.
So as you can see from the above you can get twice the space, RAM, CPU and Power for only $10 more? Surely it costs them more than the $10?
Also my final point is LSN have a private network, that is not bandwidth monitored and your servers can use, I asked LSN if you could tunnel the traffic from one server to another, their answer was “yes if you have the technical knowledge to do so”... Well that would get rid of the $50 pooling costs... making it actually alot cheaper to get two servers.
I'm looking to get a VPS offshore (please look at my other threads/posts to learn why) primarily for email for 4 or 5 domain names (most of which I'd download to my desktop but would also backup on the server) as well as perhaps to run a virtual desktop through and/or store some data.
For ease of use (for ME at least), I'd install (or have installed) a CP and probably run Centos 5 or Debian as the OS on the VPS. I won't be running websites from the VPS and I'll be the only user.
I've seen offers of all types related to bandwidth but, in some countries, bandwidth is expensive and they offer little as a result. How do I determine how much bandwidth I need for what I want to do and how do I know what's too little?
I have a server with a 10Mbps connection. Is there a way to limit the connection of my VPSs?
Lets say I have 10 VPS on that server, is there a way to limit them to 1Mbps each? Or do something like: VPS_01 = 0.5Mbps VPS_02 = 0.5Mbps VPS_03 = 0.5Mbps VPS_04 = 0.5Mbps VPS_05 = 1Mbps VPS_06 = 1Mbps VPS_07 = 1Mbps VPS_08 = 1Mbps VPS_09 = 2Mbps VPS_10 = 2Mbps
And/Or is there a way to monitor the data transfer of each VPS (how many GB/month)?
I've found a colocation company that gives me as the default 1.544Mbps as the initial bandwidth. I think this is OK for me most of the time, the problem is their bandwidth isn't really 'burstable', and If I want to expand to more bandwidth, my options are something like buying another T1's worth muxed in for $250.
Is this strange? Old-fashioned? Should I be worried about this?
I have a dedicated server and I would like to know how much bandwidth I use each month, this information is not provided in the control panel, is there any way to find out?
my plesk control panel for my dedicated server and with all 3 of my domains FTP and HTTP transfers I'm getting below 500MB this month. However, GoDaddy's control panel says that I'm using 486GB. So where could the other 499.5 GB of bandwidth be coming from? I don't have that much email going on. No file attachments or anything.
Is it better to pay for 95th percentile or (what ever that is) is it better to pay per GB used.
I pay per 100GB used and I can upgrade it at anytime during the month which makes it very easy to manage but I would like to more about the differences here.
My issue is and not really that big of one but when I have paid for 400GB and then on the last day of the month I go to 410GB and have to buy 100GB more so I do not get charged overages. I end up with 90GB left unused which someone is banking my cash on.
Besides that I think this really works well for me.
Hello all, I run a popular Canadian site called CKA at www.canadaka.net I am trying to improve the performance of the site and I am looking at getter another server to offload many of the other smaller sites I also host on my main Dual Xeon rackserver. At the same time I am looking for a new Colocation host, because I feel im paying way too much at my current host.
But something I am confused about is how much bandwidth I need. I am not talking about bandwidth in the data transfer sense, but in the connection speed.
Many hosts have options/packages ranging from 1Mbps to 100Mbps. Many packages with 1,3,5,10Mbps are "unmetered" where are 100Mbps is usualy metered. I'm not sure what speed I need for my site so that there is no bottleneck at peak times. Because the price difference changes a lot between these options, so if a 10Mbps won't have any noticable difference over a 3Mbps, why pay more?
I'm not really that imformed on all this, but i have MRTG setup on my server here: [url] so someone more knoledable than me might be able to better acess what I need?
As far as data transfer, the server uses between 300GB - 500GB a month.
I am interested in colocating somewhere in the US. I'm looking for cheap bandwidth, like cogent, but tons of it, like 100-1000mbits. Let me know where I can find the best deal for 100 and 1000mbits.
I have a question that's been bugging me for a few months now (which has gotten worse as traffic increases). I run a site that gets some decent traffic (about 9-10M pageviews per month), and is mostly made up of HTML pages with a lot of images (some pages have about 200k of images, others have maybe 1.5-2MB of them). I have a dedicated server that has 2TB of bandwidth per month, and I'm quickly approaching the 2TB point... what should I do?
Normally, I'd buy more bandwidth... but the host I have charges $400/month for 10mbps unmetered bandwidth -- more than the cost of the server each month! What other options do I have?
I was looking at a VPS plan that offered unmetered bandwidth on a shared 100mbit/s port. I thought it was a bit suspicious because it was at a very low price--but would this be what it means?
100mbit/s converts to 0.125 megabytes per second = 7.5mb/min = 450mb/hour = 10,800mb/day ~ 334,800mb/month = 334.8gb/month
Would that mean that I would be getting less than 334.8gb of bandwidth a month, but it's just filtered through to make sure I don't go over?
So I run a small music forum site. We used to have the ability for our users to download music track sets. We had over 100 files that are generally around 80MB and the users could add more so our space requirements would increase over time.
We initially set this up with dreamhost.com (unlimited bandwidth/space) but they eventually asked us to stop using the space as a data repository and wanted to charge $1 per GB transferred (which at that time was about $100-120/month).
The Problem:
This is something our users want and would probably pay for. I'm sort of asking for advice on how to approach this problem. Need to figure out how we could set this up and what to charge the users for downloading the music files (price per file, monthly plans, etc). Considering we want to keep it cheap enough that users will pay and the hosting costs would probably rise with the demand and exposure of the program. What sort of hosts should I be looking for?
