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Advice on suitability of a low end box
adrianlambert
Member
I'd be grateful for any advice on suitability of a low end box to host 3 photography portfolio sites (all mine) in the UK, one for a blog with 300 and growing images, one for general stuff with around 500 pics and one for architecture with around 500 pics. Plus I'd also like to host a community group wordpress site with a handful of images and videos.
The main folios will show around 50 pics and the rest will be in unlisted pages that I can distribute to potential clients as I encounter them. Obviously bandwidth isn't an issue as the only visits I get are when I solicit them directly of generate interest from social media. Think the max I've had in a day was around 200. Usually I'd get 20-30 unique visitors per week.
The folio sites use mysql databases.
I'm considering the OpenITC vps offers listed on the site here but not sure what features are required. For example RAM, I'm guessing 512MB? Also KVM non SSD or OpenVZ with small SSDs? I've done some reading on the pros and cons of each so I'm not looking to start a discussion on that here as there's plenty around but it seems that for three small databases the KVM non SSD plans would be fine.
Obviously I'd like the end users to have a good experience without too much lag but don't want to over stretch my budget as I'm not generating much income at all at the moment.
Thanks in advance.
Adrian
Comments
Never used them, but from what their site says, it looks like they are managed VPSes.
Do you want managed or unmanaged? Budget?
As far as OVZ vs KVM, it all depends on what you want or need.
I think you need to follow the link here http://lowendbox.com/blog/openitc-20year-256mb-ssd-openvz-4-25month-512mb-kvm-and-more-in-maidenhead-uk/ to see the cheap ones. It's budget and theres the choice between OVZ (small SSDs) and KVM (Doesn't specify disk type but they are much larger drives - so probably non SSD). I need some space but if SSDs are going to make the user experience much better then I'd restructure to reduce the space required.
Depending on your budget, you might want to check out RamNode, they still have their 42% off promo going on. The plans at OpenITC sound lackluster to me, outside of having an insane amount of IPv6 addresses.
RamNode's plans are a bit more expensive, but you get more disk space, even on the SSD plans.
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/597623
Sorry. Didn't mention I'm in the uk. So need a good experience for uk visitors. I looked at a few uk hosts in the uk on petabyet.com and OpenITC came off very well as far as I understand
@adrianlambert If you wish i can set you test enviroment on our byteshack.net range with Vesta CP so you can test service for a week.
Love your site @drserver but from the figures that I've seen for UK speeds from that corner of the globe I feel it would likely be a lot of work on my part for too high a risk of not achieving the user experience that I'm aiming for. Appreciate the offer though.
@CharlesA please excuse my manners. Thanks for your suggestion.
Thank you for kind words. It is a free test drive... as you wish. If you change your mind feel free to contact me.
Certainly will. Thanks @drserver.
I guess it boils down to:
Do SSDs make a worthwhile difference for requirements like mine?
How much RAM would I need?
And will a similarly featured KVM perform as well as a non oversold OpenVZ? (Or XEN PV?)
Honestly, considering your req's, I'd say Ramnode NY or Amst would be a good thing to combine with Cloudflare to give users a good experience.
Thanks @Rallias, is that in consideration of my looking for good experience in the UK?
Yes. New York and Amsterdam are both in good ping-proximity with UK, and Cloudflare has a UK POP, meaning your dynamic content will load quickly, and your static content (images, et al) even faster.
I run an owncloud and wordpress database off of a 1GB ssd cached voz box at RamNode. I think you might be able to squeeze that into a 512MB box, but the nice thing is if you do get a 512 box with the 42% off code, you can always upgrade it to a 1GB box later down the line if you need to.
But yeah +1 to NYC/Amsterdam.
Thanks again. I'll look into those tomorrow.
I read your requirements as in anything would do. Seriously, this is not some heavy joomla site, but even that would do. You dont need UK for best experience, this is not a game where 10 ms will make a difference in who shoots first. Amsterdam will do great for sure, even OVH in france with a 5 Eur dedi.
OpenITC will be fine choice if you decide to go with them. They're probably the best UK Lowend hosts IMO.
If there's a game out there that relies upon a 10ms or less tick without consideration to latency to clients, remind me to never play it.
OpenITC or DotVPS is probably your best bet!
(Dot is merging with Virtora at the moment) but is still taking orders.
My box there has been up for the last year with no reboots.
Thanks wych. I'll take a look at the dotvps offerings too.
We have customers who complain if their average latency is more than 25ms on our Battlefield servers.
Our UK customers on our French OVH servers get a steady 30 - 40ms with players connected and as a gamer myself I think that's excellent.
I agree with many of the opinions here. I think RamNode would suit you well in Amsterdam or NYC and I've only had positive experiences with them.
Be sure to take advantage of any offloading you can do, specifically the media. Cloudflare is great, but you can also host your images on a 3rd party service like Flickr, Imgur, etc. This can reduce your storage requirements and free up some bandwidth & (minimal) cpu usage.
Thanks @mikeyur, the CMS that I'm using http://koken.me makes it really easy to upload the the server and really difficult to offload. I have looked into it before though. Also cloudflare can't deal with ssl on the free plan which is needed for the CMS admin. I'll look into working around that so that I can take advantage though. Thank you all for the tips and pointers.
They have a plugin for CDN's/Offloading apparently - http://help.koken.me/customer/portal/questions/1388776-koken-and-cdn
Great! I was watching the usual channels and hadn't searched the topic except for under my particular service provider (zenfolio). I'll give them a poke on that.
Have emailed Koken support to find out more. In the meantime as my images are generated by GD or imagick I'm advised that cloudflare won't be much help to me.
I guess you could run a caching proxy if you are that worried about speed, but I'm not sure how well that will work if your content is generated on the fly.
Its generated and cached on the server so once created its static but until someone wants it it doesnt exist.
I wouldn't worry about getting a UK vps, just something in Europe would be good. I'd recommend hosting it in the Netherlands (Ramnode or Iniz) or France (OVH includes ddos protection)
rammode seem to be very popular. Thanks @Sc754.