Need the Best Damn Dedicated Server Company

moratraffic

moratraffic

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Jun 16, 2007
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Gettysburg
www.plibb.com
Just like the title says. I need a badass server that can still run fast while processing a shit ton of stuff. Thought I would ask for recommendations though before just picking any company and wasting hundreds of dollars on a shit service. Any suggestions?
 


moratraffic said:
Just like the title says. I need a badass server that can still run fast while processing a shit ton of stuff. Thought I would ask for recommendations though before just picking any company and wasting hundreds of dollars on a shit service. Any suggestions?
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What type of server? A QuadCore? What type of bandwidth?

I gotcha covered.

Or are you looking for a cheap box, ton of RAM, and a decent chip?
 
Not a 100% sure about the cheap box. I am new to dedis but QuadCore would kick ass if you have around say 10 to 15TBs. We want the site to be as fast as freakin possible because we will be pulling in a ton of RSS feeds. We want a lot of RAM I assume for this. What would you think?

Basically, the site is a highly modified version of the social bookmarking site pligg, which is kinda resource heavy anyways. We are pulling in a ton of rss feeds, but the site is fairly simple, meaning no videos, flash or anything like that on the frontend. Also, we are running a ton of subdomains off of it, basically making more pligg sites, which is slowing it down. Besides working on the pligg script, which we are, we also thought a badass server would work as well. Suggestions?
 
moratraffic said:
Not a 100% sure about the cheap box. I am new to dedis but QuadCore would kick ass if you have around say 10 to 15TBs. We want the site to be as fast as freakin possible because we will be pulling in a ton of RSS feeds. We want a lot of RAM I assume for this. What would you think?

Basically, the site is a highly modified version of the social bookmarking site pligg, which is kinda resource heavy anyways. We are pulling in a ton of rss feeds, but the site is fairly simple, meaning no videos, flash or anything like that on the frontend. Also, we are running a ton of subdomains off of it, basically making more pligg sites, which is slowing it down. Besides working on the pligg script, which we are, we also thought a badass server would work as well. Suggestions?
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What's your budget? Are you looking to run everything on a single box?

I can crunch some numbers based on the BW you need, and some different boxes. Now that I have some ideas based on what you are looking to use it for, I can get you some aggressive pricing.

Current Server Specs
Bandwidth Used/Plan
OS

...all the pedigree info so I can bang out some numbers.

 
moratraffic said:
I am thinking $300/month is probably the most that I would feel comfortable with.

Thanks subigo I will check them out.
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Well, I can get you a QuadCore, 8GB of RAM, two 1.5TB drives, with RAID ARRAY (redundancy), free back ups, for $275.00 with no set up fee, and no contract. But what's going to get you would be the amount of bandwidth you are looking for. With a budget of $300.00, you are going to either sacrifice on hardware, or on BW.

You could do a dual core, and jack up your BW, or a faster machine and processor, but sacrifice on bw speed.
 
You should consider 100tb.com. They use Softlayer's network and fit within your budget:

Intel Quad Core Xeon 3220 - 4 x 2.40GHz
8GB RAM
2 x 500GB HDD
1 GigE (1000Mbit) dedicated port
100TB monthly transfer
$201.15/month

You can then pay a server management company to take care of the server for you.
 
15 TBs is a fucking hell of a lot of bandwidth. If you need such an immense amount of bandwidth then something like liquidweb would fail you. Softlayer, 100tb.com or if you have nerves of steel then FDC come to mind. But the more bandwidth you get the more you will have to compromise in terms of either CPU power, hard disk space or latency/reliability of the network. So, it's also important to figure out where you expect your bottlenecks to be and what you can also compromise on. Is it more important to have tons and tons of CPU horsepower or would your bottleneck be I/O with all the streaming you are doing? Hell you might even be better off getting two $150 servers and try your hand at load balancing because if you ever intend to expand then there won't be one server monstrous enough to accomodate you.

If your applications are going to be constantly thrashing your hard drives then you might need a server with a SAS controller and 4 hard drives. It all depends, you really need to figure out what your bottlenecks are going to be.

And RSS afaik is just pure text and with no video streaming I think 15TBs might be way more than you need but I'm just guessing here. Your first step would be to make an accurate assesment of your bandwidth consumption which I suspect might even be 1/10th of 15TB lol.
 
extor said:
15 TBs is a fucking hell of a lot of bandwidth. If you need such an immense amount of bandwidth then something like liquidweb would fail you. Softlayer, 100tb.com or if you have nerves of steel then FDC come to mind. But the more bandwidth you get the more you will have to compromise in terms of either CPU power, hard disk space or latency/reliability of the network. So, it's also important to figure out where you expect your bottlenecks to be and what you can also compromise on. Is it more important to have tons and tons of CPU horsepower or would your bottleneck be I/O with all the streaming you are doing? Hell you might even be better off getting two $150 servers and try your hand at load balancing because if you ever intend to expand then there won't be one server monstrous enough to accomodate you.

If your applications are going to be constantly thrashing your hard drives then you might need a server with a SAS controller and 4 hard drives. It all depends, you really need to figure out what your bottlenecks are going to be.

And RSS afaik is just pure text and with no video streaming I think 15TBs might be way more than you need but I'm just guessing here. Your first step would be to make an accurate assesment of your bandwidth consumption which I suspect might even be 1/10th of 15TB lol.
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Well said.

That's what I was thinking as well, especially with the two servers. I personally feel the thing that's going to make or break this project is strong back end and code. Based on what the O.P. is looking to do, that is a lot of server calls. So you do not want it to bottle neck. Bandwidth is great, but I have personally seen plenty of times people try and compensate bad code with more RAM and BW.

I would think that starting at something like 25, and monitoring it and moving up accordingly to usage and budget would be best. No need to pay for 15TB bandwidth if you are only spiking at 100M. Monitoring and adjusting is key so you are not overpaying.
 
Thanks for all the great info in here. I know we won't use 15TB, that was just more of a high end suggestion. I am sure 1 or 2 TB will be enough for awhile. I like the idea of having 2 servers and balancing them, so that might be something to help speed up the site as well. 100tb.com looks to have a lot of great features with the Inferno package and looks like something we are looking for and might be able to adjust spending the extra money.
 
moratraffic said:
Thanks for all the great info in here. I know we won't use 15TB, that was just more of a high end suggestion. I am sure 1 or 2 TB will be enough for awhile. I like the idea of having 2 servers and balancing them, so that might be something to help speed up the site as well. 100tb.com looks to have a lot of great features with the Inferno package and looks like something we are looking for and might be able to adjust spending the extra money.
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No problem buddy. My main concern for you would be on the BW side. You do not wanna overpay and not use your BW. You would want something burst-able, and you want to monitor it.

For a QuadCore with decent BW, here is a ballpark just to get some bearings.

Intel Quadcore Xeon X3330
4GB RAM
2x1TB 7.2k SATA HDD's (Raid-1)
2x1000mbps NIC

With:

Remote Reboot
FULL Server Management
FREE Managed Data Migration
100mbps Dedicated Bandwidth on 1Gbps Port
Accurate RRD Based Bandwidth Monitoring
Brand New, Fully Warrantied Hardware

$625.00/mo. + $0 setup, on a 12-month term
 
moratraffic said:
Not a 100% sure about the cheap box. I am new to dedis but QuadCore would kick ass if you have around say 10 to 15TBs. We want the site to be as fast as freakin possible because we will be pulling in a ton of RSS feeds. We want a lot of RAM I assume for this. What would you think?

Basically, the site is a highly modified version of the social bookmarking site pligg, which is kinda resource heavy anyways. We are pulling in a ton of rss feeds, but the site is fairly simple, meaning no videos, flash or anything like that on the frontend. Also, we are running a ton of subdomains off of it, basically making more pligg sites, which is slowing it down. Besides working on the pligg script, which we are, we also thought a badass server would work as well. Suggestions?
Click to expand...
Unless you get like thousands of visitors per hour on each site you own, I don't think that a QuadCore's necessary. I know that it would sound great and everything but most of the strain a site like yours puts on is the database, which consumes a LOT of RAM (so yes, you might want to have at least a few gigs of it). So why would you pay extra for anything else? Just for kicks? Even if you could invest that money instead (or buy some booze ;) )?

Besides, for $300 a month you can't get a killer HW with a huge bandwidth. Only one of them. Your service might consume not only a lot of RAM but quite a lot of bandwidth too. Though I still think 15 TB is way too much. If I were you I'd start with about 500 gigs, then increase to 1 TB, but only if necessary.

You see when you've mentioned that you want a "badass server" for the first time, I thought that you're gonna do video conversion/game server/graphics rendering on it. Now those services DO need a lot of CPU power along with a fair amount of RAM (and bandwidth too). You on the other hand want to run a site which does only text processing combined with database access. Since text (and HTML and RSS is mostly text too) needs much less resources, you might want to plan carefully, do your homework (and maybe google up some load statistics or something) before you decide to cough up $300 a month for a server that your business will depend on.
 
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