Michael MD @ SPRACI

Arto

1 year ago

@ Lazy Admin

Ok, so myfriendica.net is almost up to 40 users, including 3 active users who registered over the last 24 hours. Another month or so, and I'll be migrating to a dedicated host, because it just makes much more sense in terms of the $ at that point.

This is exciting, but also it means that planning for a server move must start now. That's ok, since a dedicated server will offer performance far beyond what I'm now getting (a 512mb RAM vps), so it should support a couple of hundred users - which seems like a nice upper limit for a site in any event (keeping in mind @ Thomas Willingham idea of many servers with not so many users as the model).

@ Thomas Willingham @ Lazy Admin

16 comments show more

Thomas Willingham

1 year ago

I tell you, if I could find a dedicated host that accepted epay...

My figures are an ideal. In reality, we're going to have to host a lot more than that between us until we get a hardware solution.

So yeah, it's great you're willing to take that leap. I expect to follow you eventually, but I'm staying here as long as I can.

Arto

1 year ago

Well, the x-terra hosts you mentioned had some really good prices. I wonder if Telecoms offer dedicated servers?

Thomas Willingham

1 year ago

They do co-hosting in Atlantis, but it's $ridiculous

Arto

1 year ago

Hmm, well, if it turns out the stuff is above reach, I'll up the RAM to 768, or 1024 and hope for the best.

Michael MD

1 year ago

code could to be made less memory hungry .. a much more affordable approach!

I've been running an events community site with thousands of users on a shared host for over a decade and never considered a dedicated host because it was just too much money to even think about!

.. whenever there were load issues I looked for other ways to to make it cope - adding caching, reducing queries and getting rid of memory-hungry joins, using files created by cron scripts every few hours for busy listings pages, restricting access for known robots to some stuff they don't need to see, max request rate limits on api requests, using ip banlists to reduce traffic from known nasty/spammy bots, rewriting stuff in c, etc etc, whatever ad-hoc fix I could find!... throwing hardware at the problem was never an affordable option!

Arto

1 year ago

Yes, and I'm doing everything short of writing C, or modifying sql schemas - I'll let people who are much better than me do that.
But, I don't think a 512mb RAM virtual server is going to support thousands of users of a social network, no matter how many queries you reduce.

My point is that virtualization has its sweet spot, but it is also over-hyped for what you get. I don't need the ability to dynamically scale my servers to support a changing base of users in the hundreds of thousands or millions. I know I'll be running a server of - at most - several hundred people. At some point, if the price is right, there's no point in paying $20/month to gain access to a virtualized server with 1024mb of RAM, if I can spend $30 and get three times that, plus access to a swap partition and full use of cpu cycles. The only thing I;ll be throwing away at that point is paying for overpriced vps instances.

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

Not only the costs, but Dedicated Hosts might also have all sort of demands, such as a written letter sent to them 2/3 months previous to the final cancelation of the service etc, it is a complete different ball game from a VPS.

And in all fairness, I do administer a good few Dedicated Hosts and VPSes at work, and I cant tell the difference between both.

Well, I can, you need to try to stick as much stuff as possible in a Dedicated Host to justify its price. On a VPS, you can have hundreds of them running one or two sites each, since the client is the one paying for the host, and is pretty happy anyway that there are no other sites in the same box putting their on at further risk.

Also, for the price of the VPS, you can get one or two for a Friendica server if you have the funds, a third one to serve the database alone, and then load balance the DNS between them two servers - you can do all sorts of mix and match with a few VPSes in hand anyway, once you get them linke serving that single service, it will act pretty much like a server in the clo... show more

Michael MD

1 year ago

if you can really actually get it that cheap .. it would certainly be tempting ... but I'd be worried about unexpected extra charges for traffic (with a site doing 4GB or more per day).. hosting I use here is though work and its not a problem for them.

I don't think a 512mb RAM virtual server is going to support thousands of users of a social network

probably not easily in the style of something friendica-like, but i wouldn't say impossible given that in the early 90s we saw usenet (federated public forums I guess you could describe that as) servers handle huge numbers of users with the kind of hardware they had back then!

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

About extra charges for traffic, some of them, like Hetzner, have monthly limits of 2 to 4 TB traffic, what is 68 to 136 GB daily, for 13 to 20 euro, http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix .

At least 1 TB traffic/month should be standard today anyway otherwise it is a rip-off.

Arto

1 year ago

@ Rove Monteux you're right about the option of having a separate database and web servers on different vps. That would make sense as the next step if users keep coming in (just got 2 registered this morning :)

I'm not committed one way or another, for now i"m perfectly happy at my host.

@ Rove Monteux

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

Yeah I had 4 linked up VPSes on LusoVPS at one stage for the happeningin.eu and a few news aggregator sites - 2 very very low spec VPSes as crawlers, 1 database and 1 webserver, all worked perfectly and was a fraction of the price of a Dedicated Server - you need to profile how much the site is using atm and do a matrix with predicted growth, to know what will you need in the near and mid term future anyway, but the coward's way is not doing the profiling, not doing the matrix, not doing any linkup, simply get a lump of cash and run pay a fortune to Amazon.

Arto

1 year ago

LOL, no Amazon, no way. No Rackspace either. I'm using a host in Bulgaria, fitvps.com and they've been great so far. Good support too, the giuy who runs the service is a well-know Bulgarian Debian hacker active from the 90s, He's a good guy.

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

lol, that Flex option looks good, you can like make a webserver with very little disk, as Friendica saves images and most everything in the database, and another one with tons of disk for the database alone, and balance ram/burstable ram among them both, if you know the guy, he is into open source, and you tell him it is for the Friendica project you can sure get to some sort of good arrangement with him anyway ?

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

Just reading their Terms and Conditions, https://www.fitvps.com/terms-conditions ,

"- We rate limit outbound SMTP connections and also log any SMTP connection attempts that exceed our limits."

You might get in trouble with that as well, need to tell him whats the VPS being used for and why is it sending tons of email out.

Arto

1 year ago

Good catch, I'll check with him. I would have preferred if it was Xen or KVM-based, due to better memory management architecture (I've been reading on this, because I don't know how to use nginx, and Apache is very greedy on OpenVZ without messing with memory stack size settings :), but fit's prices are really good. Plus, I'm from Bulgaria (though not living there now), so I'm supporting the IT industry along the Black Sea :)

btw, LusoVPS looks really good as well, on price and what you get. 10 euro for 1024mb RAM and 75gb hard drive looks great. Good to know.

Rove Monteux

1 year ago

oh yeah need to support the local IT industry.

LusoVPS is great value, VPS is provided in seconds as well with no documentation needed at all, though office is in Portugal but the servers are physically located in Paris.

They had the same problem with email so you need to configure the VPS to send email through their relay rather deliver it directly, it is a two-line no brainer to do on Postfix so it is not a bother at all.

Best VPSes I got were all on Hetzner in Frankfurt though, it is a bit more expensive and you have to provide documents with your first order, but it is top, top class, they also offer FreeBSD, what is quite a rare thing to see anyway, and you can install it in minutes yourself or most other flavors of Linux using their control panel.

Michael MD

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