36 ms·

Where to go after dedicated hosting

5 points by rolandojones 16y ago

We are a medium sized business with about 250,000 registered users and up until this point have done fine with a Dedicated Server at HostGator. I have become fed up with their impersonal support (a different person responds to every support request) and am now facing our second hard drive failure in 3 months, which they remedy by taking the site down for 6 hours to do a hard drive and OS re-install. I am now looking into Managed hosting solutions, primarily with HostWay and Rackspace. I'm not a server admin by any means, but it seems to me that in order to avoid the down time associated with a hard drive failure that 2 web servers and probably a load balancer are required. Is that true? Generally speaking, what is the next step for hosting when a dedicated server doesn't cut it anymore from an availability point of view?

eof 16y ago
You may not need a load balancer yet.. you can't just get a new, bigger server? We use rackspace's managed hosting solutions as well as their cloud. I wasn't here for the set up of everything, but I can say for certain the support is very, very good. I would look into moving into the cloud as well if you don't have legal reasons for not doing it.
tshtf 16y ago
Have you thought about Amazon EC2? With careful planning you can have scalability, DR, and availability.
rolandojones 16y ago
We do have some clients that are very concerned with security (fortune 100 banks), so I am hesitant to go the cloud computing direction. Our current server is powerful enough, but the challenge with a dedicated server is, how do you keep your site up if the hard drive fails? As far as EC2 I'm used to developing on a LAMP stack and I'm not sure what that transition would look like. We're a small shop (it's essentially me working as a full stack developer) so we don't have that many resources. Thanks for your insights!
- MPSimmons 16y ago
  With servers of even the low end of the middle, there should always be redundant system disks. The next step up in servers from what you have should use RAID-1 mirrored disks. Availability is a sliding scale in terms of reliability and money. You don't pay for stopping things that will happen, you pay to stop things that /could/ happen. The additional cost of a real RAID card plus an additional disk is insurance against the single drive failure that would make your machine unavailable. Your redundant power supplies do the same thing. As do your redundant NICs. Disaster planning is the art of asking, "What if..." and having answers. Of course, for every answer, a certain amount of money is required. My advice to you is to either go to the cloud now, before you invest more money in a physical infrastructure, or if thats not possible, buy "real" hardware and don't use what are essentially glorified laptops in a server case. Get a server that is rackmountable, has redundant hard drives (and if the server has system disks and data disks, configure it so that the system disks are a mirrored RAID-1 pair, and the data disks are not RAID-5), that has redundant power supplies, and redundant network cards. It really does sound expensive when you list it out like that, but those features are so standard that you can't really avoid them if you buy middle-class or higher servers. Here's a guest blog post I did on redundancy last year for SysAdvent: http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html
arn 16y ago
What about a RAID 1 setup (mirrored). If a hard drive dies, you just have to schedule a swap out, which shouldn't take that long, and you could schedule during a lull in your usual traffic. That would just defend against an abrupt hard drive failure, and is probably the cheapest short term solution unless you want to mirror a second server or on-demand cloud hosting. I run a large vbulletin server, and in my most recent server upgrade, I've configured my attachment server in this config for that reason.

5 points by rolandojones 16y ago

eof 16y ago

You may not need a load balancer yet.. you can't just get a new, bigger server? We use rackspace's managed hosting solutions as well as their cloud. I wasn't here for the set up of everything, but I can say for certain the support is very, very good. I would look into moving into the cloud as well if you don't have legal reasons for not doing it.

tshtf 16y ago

Have you thought about Amazon EC2? With careful planning you can have scalability, DR, and availability.

rolandojones 16y ago

We do have some clients that are very concerned with security (fortune 100 banks), so I am hesitant to go the cloud computing direction. Our current server is powerful enough, but the challenge with a dedicated server is, how do you keep your site up if the hard drive fails? As far as EC2 I'm used to developing on a LAMP stack and I'm not sure what that transition would look like. We're a small shop (it's essentially me working as a full stack developer) so we don't have that many resources. Thanks for your insights!

MPSimmons 16y ago
With servers of even the low end of the middle, there should always be redundant system disks. The next step up in servers from what you have should use RAID-1 mirrored disks. Availability is a sliding scale in terms of reliability and money. You don't pay for stopping things that will happen, you pay to stop things that /could/ happen. The additional cost of a real RAID card plus an additional disk is insurance against the single drive failure that would make your machine unavailable. Your redundant power supplies do the same thing. As do your redundant NICs. Disaster planning is the art of asking, "What if..." and having answers. Of course, for every answer, a certain amount of money is required. My advice to you is to either go to the cloud now, before you invest more money in a physical infrastructure, or if thats not possible, buy "real" hardware and don't use what are essentially glorified laptops in a server case. Get a server that is rackmountable, has redundant hard drives (and if the server has system disks and data disks, configure it so that the system disks are a mirrored RAID-1 pair, and the data disks are not RAID-5), that has redundant power supplies, and redundant network cards. It really does sound expensive when you list it out like that, but those features are so standard that you can't really avoid them if you buy middle-class or higher servers. Here's a guest blog post I did on redundancy last year for SysAdvent: http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html

arn 16y ago

What about a RAID 1 setup (mirrored). If a hard drive dies, you just have to schedule a swap out, which shouldn't take that long, and you could schedule during a lull in your usual traffic. That would just defend against an abrupt hard drive failure, and is probably the cheapest short term solution unless you want to mirror a second server or on-demand cloud hosting. I run a large vbulletin server, and in my most recent server upgrade, I've configured my attachment server in this config for that reason.