Dedicated Server hosting - local

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CVRChameleon

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Hi guys,

We currently have a local online Magento E-commerce store online and running; hosted at Hostgator (shared hosting unfortunately), but its running quite slow. The issue we have though; is that we can't use built-in backend features of Magento, because its long-running PHP scripts (for example creating a new Attribute Set); and Hostgator on their shared hosting is that it only allows 30 seconds on time-outs for scripts, which they can't change. Also, I have to run imports from a custom 3rd party script Magmi locally to our online database, because of the built-in Magento import time-outs.

Magento is a very resource intensive CMS system, and we know that shared hosting is not recommended, we wanted our store online first, with products (4000+ atm), but we are now looking at dedicated options.

So, instead of using Hostgator again as dedicated hosting, I want to get some suggestions on local dedicated hosting options. We need a hosting option that will be fast, reliable, less restrictive on time-out of scripts (some Magento operations might take more than 5 minutes).

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!
 
Hi CVRChameleon

With any dedicated server you are in control of the environment variables, and have full control to adjust these according to your requirements.

Many of the local providers should be able to provide you with a semi and fully managed solution that will greatly improve the speed of your site.
 
First and only question regarding dedicated hosting:

Why not go VPS?

Motivation:
No hardware or redundancy requirements
No Legacy costs
Easily upgradable

I could go on.
 
FFF4Skin said:
First and only question regarding dedicated hosting:

Why not go VPS?

Motivation:
No hardware or redundancy requirements
No Legacy costs
Easily upgradable

I could go on.
Click to expand...

Good advice right here. (Just make sure there are usage caps :p ) :D
 
On another note.

Simple VPS setup.

Debian + Nginx + Apache + PHP + MySQL + IPtables + TC = 1 Solution
 
So,

Which company/s to use, I have not seen any suggestions? Who is reliable, who is not? For instance, I already see in the thread list do not use Afrihost VPS etc?

Why use VPS, what are the pros compared to dedicated hosting?

No hardware or redundancy requirements
No Legacy costs
Easily upgradable

I could go on.
Click to expand...
Go on please :P

LMFAO + Ghoti.

Yes make sure to stipulate a failsafe for bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Lol, I read what happened ....
 
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Pros for dedi?

Hmmm no 20% virtual overhead.
Pure hardware dedicated to you.


Thats about it regarding what you want to host. Anything else really is just over the top for what you want to host. I have a thread that you can see for a few companies. Let me copy paste the names here. And for the love of all things furry, request a trial for a week!

here is the list:

Telkom - SAAS, VPS
RSAWeb - VPS
MWeb - VPS
Dimension Data - VPS
Afrihost - VPS
Web-Africa - VPS
Cybersmart - VPS
VPS Networks - VPS
Trade Page - VPS
Ocean Host - VPS

have a pick. Ask for trials. Skip whom ever you want.

PS: Also be sure to check their SLA and SUPPORT!
 
Thanks, that is much better! A trial would help definitely.

I will look at that list, had an idea of using Mweb (already filtered one or two though * {recent topics I read...}).
 
CVRChameleon said:
Thanks, that is much better! A trial would help definitely.

I will look at that list, had an idea of using Mweb (already filtered one or two though * {recent topics I read...}).
Click to expand...

Whatever you do stay away from Mweb hosting. Just do a search on this forum to see why.
 
One of the biggest advantages of going with a virtual server (cloud based) is redundancy i.e. if the physical server fails, your virtual server is migrated to a healthy server hence no extended downtime where if a physical server fails you have to wait for it to be repaired.

The other main advantage is that you can start with lower resources (CPU, RAM, HDD) and scale up as required.
 
Its a tragedy that you must filter based on what you read here. But I like everyone can understand that you would not want to share in the experiences others display here.

That being said, things may change so dont just mark it off the list. If your still in trial times and things seem better. Go back and review. This is as it will always be a trial and error industry.

But to safe guard things for now. Stick to where you get the best balance of support over service. Sigh... we all seek it.

PS: Once you have had some XP with the local providers please give us a headsup here :)

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/572107-ZA-Cloud-Standing
 
Last edited:
FFF4Skin said:
Its a tragedy that you must filter based on what you read here. But I like everyone can understand that you would not want to share in the experiences others display here.

That being said, things may change so dont just mark it off the list. If your still in trial times and things seem better. Go back and review. This is as it will always be a trial and error industry.

But to safe guard things for now. Stick to where you get the best balance of support over service. Sigh... we all seek it.
Click to expand...

Yes, I just regard this community as a reliable and more accurate base of current experiences. It has helped me with getting some ideas on better Internet previously, so I just want to use the same community for some ideas. Of course, if someone says X is bad, but Y has several complaints, then X just might have have given bad service to less people than Y had.

I have had bad experiences with ISPs with internet previously, and mybroadband has some pretty accurate feedback from its members regarding the same issues. Filtering Y out immediately makes the other available options easier to choose from.
 
I can respect that.

Just to reiterate my last edition :P

"PS: Once you have had some XP with the local providers please give us a headsup here

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthre...Cloud-Standing"
 
CVRChameleon said:
I want to get some suggestions on local dedicated hosting options.
Click to expand...

I don't konw the ZA hosting providers (I've only ever used colo in ZA), but I'm thoroughly aquainted with Magento, so I can give you some general considerations. Some questions:

1. Are you running Community or Enterprise? I highly highly recommend the Enterprise version if you can scrape the money together.

2. How much traffic are you getting?

3. Any reason it has to be local, given that it's in the US now?

Some thoughts:

* Unless you get very little traffic, I do not recommend running this on a VPS. Performance will never be great. You'll want at least one dedicated box, with two separate RAID sets - one for MySQL, one for OS + web content. And for the love of all that's holy, stay away from RAID-5. It's the worst performance for money you can get. Get RAID-10 (4 discs are enough) for MySQL, RAID-1 for the OS.

* You do not want to store media (images etc) on your server. Use a online CDN based file storage. I highly recommend this using this plugin with Rackspace Cloud Files. The plugin does two things: It manages the uploading of new images to Cloud Files and adjusts the image URLs in the magento database, and as existing images gets requested, it uploads them too - very nifty.

* You absolutely have to use memcache (or redis if your Magento installation is new enough).

* Despite what you'll read on internet forums, please don't put NginX in front of Apache + mod_php - you're not getting anything other than unneccessary complexity. Use the webserver you're most comfortable with. If you do Apache right (i.e. not like the default config in just about every distro), there's little to choose between the two, especially when using Magento.

FFF4Skin said:
Why not go VPS?
Click to expand...

Magento is heavy on all three key resources: CPU, memory, and especially disc I/O - that last one is a killer for VPS solutions.

FFF4Skin said:
Motivation:
No hardware or redundancy requirements
Click to expand...

Don't take that for granted. Unless a VPS provider explicitely state that their VMs reside on SAN, it probably doesn't. I know many providers keep the VMs on the physical host's internal drives - certainly every one I've used does this - which means if the host dies, so does your VM untl the host is swapped out. And if the RAID in the host fails, you kiss your data good bye, so be sure to have good backups and a well rehearsed recovery plan.

Redundancy is not an umbrella term. It is specific, and your provider has to be specific about which components of your solution is redundant.

Oceanhost said:
One of the biggest advantages of going with a virtual server (cloud based) is redundancy i.e. if the physical server fails, your virtual server is migrated to a healthy server hence no extended downtime where if a physical server fails you have to wait for it to be repaired.
Click to expand...

Oceanhost said:
The other main advantage is that you can start with lower resources (CPU, RAM, HDD) and scale up as required.
Click to expand...

This is true but it's marketing fluff. If you run something like magento, you're far better off with multiple lower spec servers (virtual or dedicated). With a good deployment system (tip: anything involving ftp is not a good deployment system), you can easily add servers to the pool. This is how you scale Magento, not with bigger hardware.
 
Now thats what I call a response koffiejunkie.

Since you have made the effort to go into details I will do so as well.

I fully agree on the RAID5 statement. Its in cases an absolute waste. RAID6 and ZFS-MIrror/RAIDZ2 is the your best bet. RAID10 is hardly a solid approach given what MySQL does to your disks. Sure double the IO sounds great but with any given physical disks unless they are SAS your simply getting 250 - 400 IOPS give or take depending on manufacturer specifications/limitations.
Here is a scenario, You have all these products and all these products have diffierent meta in DB. SQL has to index all that. Now, you have a general setup for IO Queueing, which would be FIFO. SQL has to do an index run and apache has to call the php scripts. Granted you have an offsite CDN image store(Great idea for generally large static content and streams--saves on storage and load on your machine | bad idea if the people accessing your site have slow international connections--everyone will just think your site is slow or coded badly). 20 people come on to your site in one go. Chances are your gonna be out of IO. Now thats just saying if things are worse case--however not to disregards the merit of what koffiejunkie has said. For any virtualized hardware your looking at a 20% performance loss. It sounds massive, but given the fact that you were not looking to purchase the latest INTEL server yourself its not a train smash.

I totally agree on the resource hogging. In fact any large webapp with equally large MySQL requirements suffer the same problems and in the CLOUD IO is the killer of all things CLOUD like. However, thats not to say that it cannot be overcome with the correct research and approach. In any given scenario one will never truly be able to achieve true HA. Look up CAP theory if your not a believer.

On the part of using TECH you are familiar with, I do agree again. Apache works, it has been working, so if your comfortable using it then leave it as is. Nginx can be a real pain to get under your belt. So if your leaving that stock then tweak another technology to improve the performance without directly editing your LAMP setup. That being said I made a mention earlier about ZFS and I fully encourage you to look at it in fact to cover certain aspects of it let me lay it out for you.
Here is the scenario. Your currently on shared hosting and things are "OK", but its time to move to a more secured and stable setup. koffiejunkie highlighted the 3 key aspects of what is required by your CMS Magento and also what the pitfalls are of the cloud, but let me say this. CPU is hardly an issue provided your content is optimized correctly, RAM in the cloud and in any cloud should be more than enough on any host, IO, yes this kills and dually noted by koffiejunkie and everyone in the business--however, here is where ZFS comes into play. Get a VPS with enough ram, something like 8 - 12 gigs. Your not looking at using that much at present for your CMS given its on shared hosting. Now you may ask why so much RAM, simply really, ZFS stores all data on RAM before committing to disc. How is this helpful? Well given the speed of discs vs the speed or RAM being: Disk=MilliSeconds RAM=NanoSeconds your looking at an overall increase in IO at number of over 10KIOPS and I have achieved this on hardware you would laugh out of the server room. The general rule of deployment is minimum 1 GIG or RAM for 1TB storage. I recommend 5 GIG per 1 TB.

Total failure on host level as mentioned by koffiejunkie is a realistic view and does occur in the cloud but it also occurs on dedicated hosts and at any given stage granted your using RAID, your RAID has to be rebuilt. If its in the cloud however your DR time as drastically less given you have backups of your server. Every cloud host should offer this if at a price or for free and you could easily restore to another host within a matter of minutes.

**NB** AND FOR ALL THINGS FURRY.. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP PROCEDURE AND NEITHER IS DISTRIBUTED DISC OVER TCP!***

So here are my opinions on the RAID levels, skip them, go ZFS. You have the benefit of data de-duplication, data integrity, self healing storage, exportable snapshots and the IO that GAWD meant man to have.

As for the marketing fluff, granted, but its also an approach of consideration. Taking into account that this is currently running on shared hosting.

All and all, everything has its pros and cons. Its just a case of how much time and effort your willing to spend on getting working the way you desire it to.
 
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