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One bigger VPS vs multiple smaller VPS with load balancing
teochristian
Member
What do you recommend me for a high traffic website? One bigger vps with high resources or multiple small vps with load balancing? Which will fit better?
Is it the same: one vps with 4 cores 4GB RAM, 100mbps and 4*vps each with 1 core, 1 GB RAM, 100mbps with load balancing? Which will perform better?
Thank you very much!
Comments
answers to these questions are always it depends. There are too many details that impact the decision.
The bigger one, as the OS and software on itself uses resources. Having 4 OSes and 4 of all the software you need, would lower the performance.
Managing 1 VPS is also easier than 4.
Backend? Database? Read only / mostly? Easy to distribute accross 4 locations?
If it's easy (mostly reads, or better yet static site!) I'd go the 4 VPS route with a round robin: if a server goes down your site will still be up. You could even get slices from @Francisco in different locations and use anycast to redirect your visitors to the closest (if your traffic is spread globaly).
If it's not easy for you to scale it horizontaly, a good VPS or dedi with a serious provider will do the job as well and as already said by @volver will be way easier to manage.
Perhaps you can use some CDN services to solve your problem as well.
Well, depends on the outcome, one large is easier to maintain, more reliable from a software point of view (Less things to go wrong)
But, If you want 100% uptime... then a dual location setup is ideal, with LB and/or RoundRobin DNS
If you can get 4 VPS nodes all on different hardware you'll probably get better CPU performance compared to a single bigger VPS. For digitalocean for example I get better performance from 4x512mb (4 cores) compared to a single 4 core instance.
Run unixbench on both machines to see what kind of performance you can expect.
Bigger is better™
It depends on a lot of factors.
For example for some wordpress sites 2 servers would work better (3gb front end, 1gb mysql).
For other sites if your site has complex querys you might need a bigger database server maybe 2gb and 2gb.
For starters look at your current logs, where do you have the most usage?
What kind of stack are you using (PHP, ruby, python, other)? Remeber each stack handles high loads in different ways.
Can you be more specific on your needs?
I'd define what you mean by high traffic too as it's all relative. For example, a properly optimised wordpress site + optimised lemp stack with caching could handle 300 million hits/day on just 2GB DigitalOcean VPS.
So depends on VPS too. You could get a great performing VPS that could beat 4x average VPSes too. Benchmark and testing is key to evaluating VPS performance as not all VPSes are created equal (especially if web hosts differ).
If you want an engineering answer, benchmark it.
This. Also, choose the vps with high read/write iops. Some providers provide you with ssd but they cap the iops hard making it actually slow.
Make sure you get at least 820 i/os.
Well... the answer isn't it depends because it depends on how you sell the viewpoint.