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What is the best server that would meet your requirements and save you money

by casan
4 replies
Hi everyone,

This is a doubt I have had for a long time, and have not found a real answer over the internet nor have had a satisfactory answer when contacted my hosting customer service.

What I want to know:
How to choose the correct hosting server (not talking about providers but server specs) in order to satisfy my requirements, without wasting resources and money?

I am currently running a Standard dedicated with hostgator (+200usd), and I pretend to find out whether this server is too sophisticated for my needs.

Bottom line, this is what I want to open the discussion about:

How to find out what is the best server solution with the data available. How to use that data to figure it out?

I know there is data available in WHM such as cpu load, bandwidth, others parameters?
Also data at Cpanel statistics, such as kilobytes downloaded per website, and others? I also run Statcounter for more data.

So again, is there a way to use that information, make a logic process and find out what will be an appropriate hosting server?

thanks for your help
#hosting #meet #money #requirements #save #server
  • Profile picture of the author Martin Percival
    Hi Casan,

    There's not much to go on here for us to give you specific advice. Here are some things to consider.

    What kind of traffic and bandwidth do you use every day?
    Do you have a maximum response time for each page access?
    Are you running a particular Web Server or Application Server?
    Is your content dynamically generated or is it static?
    If dynamic, what programming language are you using?
    Have you considered database access times if you have a heavy usage application?

    As you can see, there are many factors and each one affects the final answer.

    If you had a perfectly tuned app/server environment, I'd want about 80% CPU usage out of your dedicated hardware. If it's not tuned, you could reach this number through many inefficiencies.

    One of the things you might consider for a commercial server is to go with a virtual server environment, something like Amazon's EC2. That will give you a low-cost start up with the chance to dynamically add or subtract server power if you hit peaks in your business e.g. the Christmas period.

    Hope this helps your thinking,

    Martin
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    • Profile picture of the author casan
      Thanks for your help!
      If I didn't provide the actual numbers was because I pretended to do the math on my own and figute it out by my self by just comparing the numbers of whatever you guided me to take as a parameter. However, since it seems to be more clear with the actual data on the table, lets bring them on:

      My dedicated server specs:
      Standard
      Intel Xeon 3360* (Quad Core)
      4 GB DDR3 Memory
      2 X 250 GB Hard Drive
      10 TB Bandwidth
      5 Dedicated IPs
      FREE cPanel

      Today server stats:
      Server load 0.5 (8 CPUs)
      Memory Used 19.55% (808,916 of 4,137,860)
      Swap Used 0.51% (10,664 of 2,096,440)

      I have asked my hostgator to provide CPU usage for the last year, but the response was "This data is stored in /var/log/sa and can be retrieved via the sar command etc etc", just too complicated for me. So anyway I got a capture of yesterday's cpu usage, a normal day: See attachment

      About bandwith
      May's bandwith usage was 428.36 Gig

      I use this server to host several websites. Some are joomla based, and others are wordpress based. I have installed cache on all sites. All websites are informational sites, they have text and still images. No gaming, streaming, etc etc

      So, supposing the data given correspond to average numbers (and nothing will change in the future), what are the actual numbers I should compare in order to find out whether I am wasting resources or not?
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      • Profile picture of the author casan
        Again, what do you think considering the info provided above?
        Thanks!
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        • Profile picture of the author Martin Percival
          Hi Casan,

          Sorry about the delay.....I was looking the other way

          I had a quick look at your usage stats and it's pretty clear that you are waaay over-specced for what you are using in that snapshot. Obviously it's hard to tell about spikes from that one image, but you are just tickling your main server.

          You can usually do a certain amount of trading of cpu and memory (for example, caching uses more memory but reduces cpu) but both of your figures are super-low. Like I said in the other comment, CPU usage of about 75-80% is a good use of a system if it's doing valid processing and not being wasted on bad coding.

          You're probably getting about $20 worth of your monthly costs in real power (and I guess we could allow a bit extra for it being a dedicated box )

          Do you need the fully dedicated server for legal reasons (or for anything else that might need your system to be completely isolated from any other hardware)? If not, you might find that the lower VPS services from HG are just as good for what you need at a much smaller cost.

          If you need a scalable solution to handle any spikes, you could look at somewhere like cloudondemand or if you have the technical clout Amazon EC2 would work out pretty cheap for your needs and would scale up if needed.
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