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wellsy - December 7, 2008 - 06:03
Can anyone in the drupal community offer performance advice on Flexihostings VPS services?
I am looking for a host who can provide VPS hosting in Australia with reasonable RAM, Storage and Bandwidth and this compay seems to be offering the right numbers but I cannot findo out too much about their performance from other users. Their website http://flexihostings.net.au/vps_hosting/cPanel_vps.html
Thanks in advance for your help!
wellsy
http://www.web24.com.au/cPanelVPS/221/cpanelVPS.html
Based on a quick look at your Flexihostings Cpanel VPS link, I suggest:
http://www.web24.com.au/cPanelVPS/221/cpanelVPS.html
Local hosting is good because response time is better. I recently moved some sites back to Australia because it saves me time when updating the sites. I looked for long term continuous up time and there were few ISPs that could prove continuous up time of years instead of months. Web24 came out in front.
Your selected ISP is offering double disk this month and Web24 offer double everything, including CPU and RAM. Based on the two specials, Web24 is the better deal.
Web24 support response is the best I have experienced from any ISP Monday to Friday. Everything works so smoothly that I have not required their support over the weekend.
The Web24 VPS FTP upload speed is a little slower than one of the other VPSs I use but everything else is a lot faster. I am moving the rest of my small sites to the Web24 VPS.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Thanks peterx!
Thanks peterx!
I have checked out your link and looking hard at what they offer.
One thing I would ask is they seem to have relatively low bandwidth limit which is a bit of a concern for me at this stage as my site is ramping up quite quickly. The 100GB bandwidth seems to be quite low in comparison to the 1000GB offered by Flexihostings?
Another question I have is what is the best choice of OS for drupal? Flexihostings offer the choice of CentOS 4, RedHat EL, and Fedora Core 5.
Thanks again!
wellsy
orchidsonline.com.au
CentOS
CentOS is Redhat with the branding removed. CentOS download the free version of Redhat then filter out the Redhat logos. That is why most ISPs offer CentOS.
Fedora is sponsored by Redhat for field testing new code. When it is clean, it goes into Redhat then CentOS pick it up. Fedora is useful for the latest drivers on brand new desktop computers and is not needed for Web hosting servers.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
You are unlikely to hit either limit
The easiest way to hit the network limit is to deliver large files. The files will be cached on the network by lots of proxy servers. You customers might see 1000GB but perhaps only 40GB will be served from your server. 1000GB will be useful if you set your HTTP headers to prevent caching.
Your VPS is one of 10, 16, 20 or more on the one server. 20 VPSs trying to deliver their individual limits of 1000GB means 20,000GB. The server's network card will probably not handle that level of data. The ISP might have 100 servers with 20 VPSs on each server and nowhere near that level of throughput where they connect to Telstra and Optus. Even when they have big connections to the Internet and all their switches, proxies, and everything else can handle the load, they will handle that load only if it is evenly distributed throughout the day across ever day of the week.
Ask them about the network slowing down at 4:00pm because another server is running a games site and hogging the network (as happened with one of my sites at a previous ISP).
Ask them about 32 servers, each with a 1000Gb connection, into a switch that has a maximum bandwidth of only 6000Gb.
If you are streaming fresh video or switching off all cache, then you need to know your guaranteed peak bandwidth all the way through to the Internet to find out what you can actually deliver on the peak hour of the busiest day.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
sustainable limits
So from what you are saying Web24 has sustainable limits to bandwidth?
wellsy
orchidsonline.com.au
Not tested
I have not tested the peak bandwidth from Web24, just saying that is what limits the network usefulness. All of my sites make good use of cache for images, which means I am unlikely to swamp the network before hitting the CPU or RAM limit.
If you produce a regular Drupal site, turn on a lot of database oriented modules, and have more logged in users than anonymous visitors, your database will be the limiting factor because logged in users get every page built fresh from the database.
My busiest site is busiest for an hour or two per day only two or three days a week. For 6 hours a week or less, it produces more than 100 times the activity it produces across the quietest hours and the quietest hours cover 80 or more hours per week. That site would hit the 100GB limit only if that peak activity continued across most hours of most days across the whole month.
If the network chokes, it is usually bad cache headers making the server deliver every image fresh from the server. There are some sites that have to turn off cache for various reasons and you might want to do that on your site. If you do have cache turned off for images or stream a radio station live, or any similar activity, you might need the 1000GB. If your customers are spaces equally around the world's 26 time zones, your site might be 100 percent busy all the time.
You have not said much about your site. Does your site stream radio or TV? Does your site deliver fresh weather maps with the cache turned off so that people always get up to the minute maps?
petermoulding.com/web_architect
the link to the site is
the link to the site is below. It is a community website which has lots of user submitted images on around 5000 odd image nodes which are quite large (up to 800 x 1024).
wellsy
orchidsonline.com.au
Here is a test anyone can do
I visited your home page then the galleries page then the home page then the galleries page again. I had Firebug turned on and displaying the network activity. On the first visit to your galleries page, by browser downloaded 334KB. On the second visit to the same page, my browser downloaded only 14KB because the rest was cached. Your site is using cache for the images.
If you browse your Apache log, you will see the first request for an image returning a status code of 200 plus the image. On the request, the response is 304 which means the image has not changed. A 304 returns about a 100 bytes of header instead of the full image. An analysis of your logs should show lots of 304s and not much data flowing out the network.
You can run AWstats or Webalyzer to count the actual usage.
I am finding Web24 the snappiest VPS I have ever used, even for FTP transfers. It only slows down when I transfer hundreds of files and only after about the first 50. Some of the other VPSes slow down in the first 10 files. The only sites I have used that are faster are sites with several servers spreading the file requests out over all the servers using hardware load balancing.
Something you can do when your site is mega busy with lots of people viewing gallery pages with multiple images is to replicate the images over several servers with hardware load balancing. A modern browser might try to download 5 or more images in parallel and you can server those images from multiple servers. Browsers are more likely to try downloading lots of images in parallel when they are from servers at different IP addresses.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Thanks so much for your
Thanks so much for your continued interest here. All your comments have been very useful. Yes I have turned on caching and it seems to have helped stop Site5 bitching and pulling the pin on my site...for now!
But how best to implement this when drupal sets just one storage area for images (which are a part of image nodes)?
wellsy
orchidsonline.com.au
Pleurothalids are a nice colour
My rock orchids look great when in flower. So easy to grow. Never have to feed or water them. Dividing them every few years is as easy as chomping into them with a shovel. They survive treatment that would shock the RSPCA.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Wonderful...you are an
Wonderful...you are an orchid enthusiast as well!
wellsy
orchidsonline.com.au