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Chris
10-15-2004, 07:44 PM
I just bought a fifth server for a massive datafeed project I'm going to undertake.

This means I'm now paying around $1k a month for hosting.... It seems like so much considering what I started out with.

I do hope to get rid of one of the servers though. My oldest one is a 1ghz duron and I'm paying $140 a month for it roughly. I plan to migrate most of the sites off of it.

James
10-15-2004, 11:43 PM
I'm paying a hefty 30 dollars a quarter. ;)
But there are only a few sites hosted on the server so it's pretty fast and the host's flexible--so if I go a few gigabytes over the limit he won't care; however, if I go 30 gb over the limit unless it's a dDOS attack then he'll charge me. I just hope if I do use that amount I'll have good ads up.

incka
10-16-2004, 01:11 AM
Massive datafeed project? Sounds good.

I'm only on one server (and quite a powerhouse it is), but I can see in a few months needing a second one...

AndyH
10-16-2004, 01:35 AM
I pay just under $500 for 5 servers.

2 Dual Xeons 2.0 (1GB RAM)
2 P4 2.4 Hyperthreaded (512MB RAM)
1 1Ghz or something, they had a sale on and it costs something like $30/mon (with 1000GB bandwidth) so I will just be using it as the download / image server

But as you said, it seems so much from where I started.

Started by hosting my website on my own computer and people could only access it when I was connected (56k mode) - then leeched free webhosting off a friend and ended up here. :D

Chris
10-16-2004, 07:41 AM
My latest two servers have been p4 3.06's, that sounds like a nice deal on the 1ghz though. My 1ghz started out at $100 a month but after memory upgrades and ensim upgrades (and tax, which I guess they don't do anymore) it was $130 (now probably $120).

Ev1 can be pretty cheap, but as time passes your server is worth less and less and they don't lower what you're paying any.

michael_gersitz
10-16-2004, 08:30 AM
Chris, What will you do when your Other sites expand out of the maximum characthers in a sig?

moonshield
10-16-2004, 09:16 AM
allow more characters in the sig.

incka
10-16-2004, 09:20 AM
Chris - You are now No.1 on google for Orienteering.

Chris
10-16-2004, 11:28 AM
Without even trying...

pas
10-16-2004, 12:04 PM
Wow. Only ever needed one server. Plain redhat. ~1.5 GHz. Serves thousands and thousands of daily uniques. Have seen such servers handle almost 100K daily uniques.

davesplace1
10-16-2004, 12:23 PM
Like most people here I started out with free hosting, then found out that paying for your own hosting more than pays for itself. Sounds like if you are paying $1k a month for hosting, bussiness must be pretty good :)

moonshield
10-16-2004, 01:53 PM
paying for your own hosting? Don't you need like a T3 line or something... aren't T1 lines over a thousand a month?

Chris
10-16-2004, 02:29 PM
It isn't cost effective to do your own hosting, much more cost effective to outsource it to a datacenter that runs thousands of servers under one roof.

I could probably fit all my sites on one server, but I wouldn't want to.

My literature site, that now has a server of it's own, was running very very slowly on the old 1ghz duron. Plus, when I'd send out the newsletter, it'd basically kill the mail server. I am going to put one or two additional sites on this server, but thats it.

My coupon and sword sites are also on their own server, why? Because when they go down I lose serious money. I don't want them on the same server as any of my other sites, especially the forum sites, since I don't want anything dragging them down.

Then my new server is for a massive datafeed project, simply massive, and I'll be moving all my AWS sites to it. It needs to be able to handle being crawled by search engines (and with millions of pages it'll be hit hard).

That leaves two servers, the one this site is on, and my old 1ghz. I'll be moving all my remaining normal content sites to this server, and I'll probably drop the old 1ghz.

Traffic isn't the only thing that decides how much a server can take though, what that traffic is doing is an important consideration. If you're just serving straight HTML thats no problem, but add scripting and database usage into the mix and you'll be able to support much less.

moonshield
10-16-2004, 03:29 PM
so it makes sense to keep databases on the more powerful servers and keep the HTML on less powerful servers.

James
10-16-2004, 03:30 PM
Couldn't you just have a script that uses AWS and churns out HTML pages?

My friend who is working on the CMS for a site we're collaborating together for made the CMS show .html pages, and I don't see why AWS couldn't.

Would HTML pages lower the load on the server, increase it, or basically cause no change?

michael_gersitz
10-16-2004, 06:31 PM
You can just set up a script that uses .htaccess to rename files taken from the database. You would have a script that gets content and inserts it into the database or you can insert it yourself. I would image there would be a way that you could grab xml and AWS data, but I would not know how to do that.

Example of the use of .htaccess using the .html ending.
http://www.infoaboutnetwork.com/archives/553.html

James
10-16-2004, 06:39 PM
Yeah but if you have static pages it = less strain on the server, doesn't it?

pas
10-16-2004, 07:09 PM
Yep. I cache AWS pages at 1 hour. AWS doesn't load my server, but the AWS calls to Amazon usually have a lag.

When I sent a newsletter I switched from sendmail (was causing my server to crash) to postfix. Absolutely amazing difference in performance.

moonshield
10-17-2004, 09:41 AM
does anyone use those hardcore Sun servers that have like 32 processors? Why would someone need such a machine?

Chris
10-17-2004, 09:50 AM
Big servers like that aren't so popular anymore, even for things like rendering video etc. Its cheaper to use dozens or hundreds of cheap 1 processor boxes working in unison.

moonshield
10-17-2004, 09:57 AM
in clusters? Google is in a cluster isn't it?

incka
10-17-2004, 10:35 AM
How are you going to spider 4 billion websites from one server, thepoorman, think about it...

Yahoo has a cluster of 60,000 servers I heard somewhere...

moonshield
10-17-2004, 11:48 AM
indeed... i was saying Google is a cluster of less powerful machines instead of a network of fewer more powerful machines.

as opposed to say NASA, they have a cluster of some 1,000 SGI systems. Or the Federal governent, they probably used supercomputers or something.

intelliot
10-19-2004, 10:22 PM
Yahoo has a cluster of 60,000 servers I heard somewhere...
Google's server farm reportedly exceeds 100,000 computers - and this was back in May.

Hmm... Google search, AdWords, AdSense, Gmail... and who knows what else they have in the works.