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By UnitedVision on
Hello,
I have a question for the experienced drupal hosting people.
We have been buidling a drupal site that is getting ready to move to a production server.
I have been charged with finding the best setup for this server. Cost is not really an issue.
I am looking to put together the best server that I can to ensure high performance for the website.
What do you recommend for a Linux OS for drupal? CENTOS, ubuntu, FreeBSD, RedHat?
What is the ideal amount of memory for a server? I know memory is crucial for drupal. Would 4 gigs be a good number?
How much drive space does a big community need? I was thinking 2 terabyte drives working in a raid would be good.
Are there any applications, processes or extensions that I should be including into the server to optimize it for drupal?
Is there anything that I am not thinking about that should be included into the server specs?
Any help or input is appreciated!
Thank You!
Comments
No simple answers here
I think you should ask yourself some other questions first --
1. It sounds like you're thinking about a dedicated server that you're going to manage yourselves? Do you have people who know about UNIX System management and tuning? If so, then the right answer for a Linux/BSD distribution is to get the one that you're experienced and comfortable with. If you are not experienced at doing this, then you need to find someone who is.
2. I don't think anyone can answer your capacity questions without a lot more info, and even then it would only be a guess. What does "big community" mean? The size of the Drupal.Com community? 1000 people? How many online at once? How big is your PHP instance with all the modules loaded? Are you running any of the various means of increasing your performance and lowering load??? (APC cache, boost, front end proxy servers, etc.?)
3. Have you thought about multiple servers?? Easiest would probably be a database server and a front-end http server.
4. When you think about disk, performance is likely more important than capacity -- 2 terabytes is an awful lot of storage for a single web site. You probably should be thinking about disk performance before size. You mention RAID, but what RAID configuration? This can make a huge difference to your database performance.
5. You should give serious thought to network connectivity - both capacity and reliability.
What I guess I'm getting at here is that you really need to understand your problem better first -- and if this is crucial, then you probably want to bring in some professional help --
Steve Hanson
Publisher Eye On Dunn County
https://eyeondunn.com
If you are asking these types
If you are asking these types of questions, you should almost certainly be using a managed hosting VPS or server solution that will give you some flexibility to adjust your server. If high availability is important to you even more so.
There are people who specialize in Drupal hosting and can work through this with you. Running a secure, highly optimized server is a complex and demanding task.
You might talk with a consultant and get some specific direction and then start looking for appropriate hosting. If you must host it in-house, an experienced consultant would almost certainly be worth their weight in gold.