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Determining your need
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Determining your need

patrokovpatrokov Member
edited October 2012 in Help

The question
How does one determine how much resources they need? Hard drive space and bandwidth is easy enough if you have logs, but how do you determine how much memory or how much CPU?

Some backround
I'm in the process of moving from a shared host to a VPS. I run four relatively small websites:
1. Personal website on Drupal 6* with quite a few modules. Hosts 3 podcasts. Get's about 15-25 GB/month bandwidth.
2. Moodle site for a non-profit agency. About 600 users are required to take a
3. 2 small Wordpress sites.

Once I've moved I would like to migrate the Drupal site to Wordpress.

Total disk space is currently about 6 GB.

The plan is nginx, mysql, php-fpm. I've been running Linux at home for 8 years including a headless server running lighttpd and dovecot, so admin without a panel shouldn't be problem.

Comments

  • @patrokov can't offer you any advice re: Drupal...but you can trivially upgrade most plans (unless the offer explicity says otherwise) so if the plan you pick isn't sufficient, open a ticket with the VPS provider... Prolly a good question to ask your provider before you sign up with 'em.

    Thanked by 1patrokov
  • You could always start with 512MB for example and monitor your VPS using munin to see how much CPU/Memory usage you've got. Pretty much any VPS provider can upgrade your plan on the spot in case you need more horsepower :)

    Thanked by 1patrokov
  • wdqwdq Member

    I'd say somewhere around 768MB of RAM. 256MB for PHP, another 256MB for MySQL, and the rest for a little overhead and Nginx.

    Thanked by 1patrokov
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    I would go for 1 GB, Drupal can be heavy at times, tho I do not expect much more than 512 usage. You will also have some panel, probably which will add up a little.
    For start, you should go with Apache, classical LAMP setup, this is why I think 1024 would not be much of an overkill. At today prices, it is not a big deal the difference between 768 and 1024. If your panel has spamassasin/clamav, you should definitely go for 1024.
    A little info about virtualization systems and resources here: http://board.prometeus.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=851&sid=d12a2ba98b6b112645e371167841727e
    M

    Thanked by 1patrokov
  • @Maounique said: You will also have some panel, probably which will add up a little.

    He said he doesn't need a panel, he has a *nix box at home, he's comfortable w/ linux.

    I would go with 512mb, if you need more ram you can upgrade easily, and a reboot is all it will take.

    Thanked by 1patrokov
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    so admin without a panel shouldn't be problem.

    He also says that will have some site for someone else and they might need a panel.
    Without, yeah, maybe 512 will do.
    M

  • Thank you for the advice and the article. I didn't want to muddy the advice with too much information. So here's some additional background.

    • I am currently in the trial period with URPAD with their WHT special (1GB memory; 5.99/mo). I had some intermittent slow down issues. After opening a support ticket, those issues went away, and performance has quadrupled according to Serverbear's benchmarks. It's tremendously faster than my previous shared account.
    • In the mean time, I discovered Lowendtalk and opened an account with RamNode (1GB, SSD, 10.35/mo). It is not so much fast as sudden.

    Here is my dilemma:
    The URPAD WHT VPS is perfectly adequate, but the RAMNODE VPS is faster for a ~$50/year premium. So I see my options as:
    1. Upgrade to URPAD's LEB special +$1/month, which gets me SSD but slightly less disk space. Cancel RAMNODE.
    2. Keep RAMNODE, and cancel URPAD
    3. Downgrade RAMNODE to 512 MB plan for $5.18/mo. I'm leaning toward this one, but I don't want to lose that fabulous performance.

    I don't think I can really go wrong with any of the options, which is what makes it so difficult.

  • wdqwdq Member

    I would personally go with the 512MB RamNode. I have a 1GB and 512MB RamNode VPS right now and both are pretty much equally fast.

    Thanked by 1Nick_A
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    Based on the reviews I saw from ppl I know, tho I am not a customer of any of those listed, I would go with ramnode too.
    M

    Thanked by 1Nick_A
  • If you feel like the Ramnode VPS performs better, I say go with it, but if you end up needing more ram, be comfortable with paying the $10.35. Most bottlenecks on VPSes are I/O based, so the URPad SSD server may perform just as good as the Ramnode one (Ramnode servers are all SSD based, right?). What processors are your VPSes using?

  • I don't have any problem paying $10.35 if I need to, but I don't want to pay it just for the warm fuzzy that a higher benchmark gives me.

    Ramnode is either SSD or SSD-cached.

    Ramnode VPS is
    CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz Number of cores : 4 CPU frequency : 3299.917 MHz Total amount of ram : 1024 MB Total amount of swap : 1024 MB System uptime : 2 days, 9:48, Download speed : (30.1MB/s) I/O speed : 870MB/s

    URPad VPS is
    CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz Number of cores : 4 CPU frequency : 3500.247 MHz Total amount of ram : 1536 MB Total amount of swap : 0 MB System uptime : 4 days, 18:56, Download speed : (10.5MB/s) I/O speed : 105MB/s

    Before I filed the support ticket, URPad I/O was 19 MB/s, so whatever they did really helped.

  • KairusKairus Member
    edited October 2012

    @patrokov said: Before I filed the support ticket, URPad I/O was 19 MB/s, so whatever they did really helped.

    While the Ramnode's I/O is impressive, if the URPad VPS fulfills your performance needs at that price point, go for it. http://code.google.com/p/ioping/ is a better way to determine I/O performance, shows a bit more useful information.

  • You can see the ioping (and more) here below if you put severbear's website in front.

    Ramnode
    http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2012/10/09/DRMWdIGlxpCpDLvW

    URPad
    http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2012/10/10/Jfcj76DOAru12rre

  • Why compare the ssd to a non-ssd?

  • Because that's what I have right now. You'll notice that option #1 was to upgrade the URPad account to an SSD account.

    "1. Upgrade to URPAD's LEB special for +$1/month, which gets me SSD but slightly less disk space. Cancel RAMNODE."

  • Nick_ANick_A Member, Top Host, Host Rep
    edited October 2012

    @patrokov - PM me what you need to be a happy (or happier) RamNode client.

    EDIT: I should also mention I've been tweaking our nodes over the past few days to milk even more performance out of them :) IOPS has increased in several readings.

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