zabbix on a Dreamhost shared-server

Question

I had some severe performance problem lately on my dreamhost shared server, and eventually they disabled some of my domains.

At the end of a long discussion with "support" i understood that the problem in not a singel domain, but having too many domains on one user. My bad, i'm still learnig.

So i think i found the solution of the problem, and i ask if i can make some tries asking them to warn me before shutting off my site again. They said that the shutting is automatic and if it happens too often they could force me on a VPS (= expensive) without warn!

I decided to look for a tool to monitor my server and warn me that something bad is happening before DH shut off my site again.

I found zabbix that looked nice, but reading around i saw that it use a lot of memory and it can be installed only on VPSs!!

The question is: is zabbix worth and working on a shared server? or it will suck up all my scarce resouces? Is there any other good alternative for monitoring a shared server?

Thanks

Answer 1

You simply will not be able to install anything like that on a shared host - you need privileged access to install or run services like that.

You could write something that monitored the basics, reading things that all users can access via the usual system status commands or from the /proc filesystem, but that would not be particularly useful as you would not be able to determine what affect your site was having on global figures.

If you are hitting the limits of what the host permits per account the I suggest moving to a VPS as soon as you can in a controlled manner, before you have to in a rush as you've been shut off, or moving to a host that allows more resource use per account (though this will be more expensive too, as to allow more resource use per account such a host will be able to cram less accounts on any given hardware, so will have to make up the difference by charging more).

You can pick up some cheaply priced VPSs these days: there are many out there for between $6 and $10/month (less if you only need something really small, but it sounds like you need something more than minimal). Just make sure you keep good off-server backups if you use a cheap provider (but you should be doing that anyway) and avoid OpenVZ hosts with a difference between "guaranteed" and "burstable" memory (this can often be beneficial in an environment you control, but in my opinion just adds a possible point of instability when you are a client on a shared VPS host). You'll find a lot of offers in places like WHT's VPS forums or sites like LEB that "specialise" in the low end of the market - but make sure you read reviews before signing up for anything. If you chose a host that allows you to reset the VM yourself (reinstalling it from scratch) you have the freedom to play a bit, roll back to the start when something goes badly wrong, lather, rinse and repeat until you feel comfortable enough to start properly moving your sites over to their new home.

Answer 2

I have to agree with David's answer, you are not going to be able to run Zabbix on a shared hosting environment like DH. I run several Zabbix installs so I'm familiar with the monitoring system and it requires daemon processes to run which no shared hosting provider is going to let you do.

Shared hosting is good for getting going early but it sounds like you're outgrowing the usefulness of shared hosting and are ready to make the next step to a VPS provider. For my money I actually go with Linode as the rates aren't bad, the service has been great and they have multiple locations. Also as David mentions they are not "OpenVZ" based and are instead Xen based so memory assigned is dedicated and guaranteed. I actually have several Linode VPS instances and run both Nagios and Zabbix from there on separate nodes.