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Possible Duplicate:
How do you do Load Testing and Capacity Planning for Web Sites

We are going to move from our current shared hosting to probably a (managed) dedicated server, and I've been looking around. Obviously there's a lot of providers and tons of options, so I'm not sure what technical specifications I should look for.

We need something that not only works for now, but also for the future, since we plan on growing fast.

Information about how we plan on using it right now:

  • We have around 20 CakePHP websites
  • We have around 5-10 custom HTML+PHP websites
  • We use around 15 small-sized MySQL databases
  • We have a Prestashop online store
  • We have a Moodle website
  • We have A LOT of content files for the websites (audios, PDFs, zips, etc)
  • Our current storage usage is around 250GB
  • We get around 10.000 - 15.000 visits per month (visits to the home pages of the websites, not counting visits to internal pages of those websites)

For the future, we're expecting a considerable increase of visits during this year. Also we'll increase the number of CakePHP websites, but not a lot (10 during this year maybe).

This is a quote that I got from one provider, which looks interesting in many ways, but I'm not sure about the specifications, if they are too much and we really don't need them, or if they will be good for when we grow:

  • CPU: i3 2100 (I believe it's a dual core)
  • RAM: 4 GB DDR3RAM
  • Storage: 2 x 500GB 7200rpm (one for backups)
  • Software: CentOS 5.5 64bit with cPanel
  • Uplink 100Mbps
  • 10,000 GB monthly bandwidth
  • Easy to upgrade storage and RAM

Total price: $233 per month

Apart from that, the provider has very good reviews for reliability and customer service.

Does that sound good for us? Too much? Too little for the future? Any advice would be much appreciated!

Community
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Albert
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  • Albert- First, welcome to Server Fault. Second, if you're a server administrator, stick around. Third, Please familiarize yourself with the FAQs - here: http://serverfault.com/faq -, as these types of questions are normally frowned upon here (this is considered a "shopping question" and generally, asking for product or service recommendations are a different sort of breed than asking for technical help on an administration issue). – David W Jan 18 '13 at 00:08

1 Answers1

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Quite frankly it's nearly impossible to know what is going to work for you. There just isn't enough information to go on. One long running or badly written query in MySQL could slow everything else down.

Rule of thumb #1. Get hardware as fast as you can afford. Rule of thumb #2. Put databases on different servers.

"We need something that not only works for now, but also for the future, since we plan on growing fast.". Since the only answer I can give you is I don't really know if it's fast enough. I can't tell you if it's still fast enough tomorrow as well. Your budget might be enough to get an adequate machine for now but not for tomorrow.

You also haven't considered redundancy at all. You have 1 server doing all of this with no ability to shut it down without taking down all the websites. You might what to think about setting up two servers with failover between them. There are plenty of examples on google on how to do this.

hookenz
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