Growing Questions

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#1 Wed, 10/05/2011 - 14:13
webwzrd

Growing Questions

I am finally outgrowing my single server hosting and I'm looking answers and suggestions on how to best expand. I currently have a VM Pro 250 license with 230 or so sites on it. The majority of the sites are web design clients of mine, however one of my resellers now has almost 100 sites.

I see a few options...

I could move to a more powerful server and bump my VM license to unlimited. However I'm leery about having an increasing number of accounts on a single point of failure.

2) I could get a second server, move my largest reseller, maybe a few other virtual servers to it. Or I could just sell it as a dedicated server and let my large reseller have the whole thing. But either way am I right in thinking I would need to pay the full price for a new VM Pro 250 license (at least for the first year)?

3) I'm also intrigued by the idea of setting up a VPS - this would be new for me, but I'm a fast study. So I could get a second server and split it into VPS's. If I did this, do I need a separate VM license for each VPS?

4) Is there a way to grow into a cloud server that might be a smarter way to go? My data center is SingleHop and they have what seems to be a pretty amazing cloud setup. However my sales rep is telling me I should stay old school and get more dedicated servers. He says the I/O times would be too slow for shared hosting. I can't tell if his advise is commission motivated of not. Should be be thinking about a Cloudmin/Virtualmin solution?

Any tips would be appreciated, Brian

Thu, 10/06/2011 - 00:04
andreychek

Howdy,

I just wanted to let you know that I saw your post, and those are good questions...I'll be responding to you tomorrow regarding that.

Have a good one!

-Eric

Thu, 10/06/2011 - 20:43
andreychek

Okay, so, any of the options you're discussing are viable options... it comes down to a bit of personal preference in combination with your needs.

A few comments on the options you listed --

Between options #1 and #2, I think you'd have better luck getting a new server rather than just growing your current one.

If your server is using a lot of disk IO now, and you spent lots on CPU -- that wouldn't actually solve your disk IO bottleneck.

But, even a small new server would allow for a number of new sites.

You're right though, if you did get a new server, you would need a new Virtualmin license.

I'm also intrigued by the idea of setting up a VPS - this would be new for me, but I'm a fast study. So I could get a second server and split it into VPS's. If I did this, do I need a separate VM license for each VPS?

Sure, you could do that!

A VPS is good if you have multiple users who want their own server, but don't really require the resources of a dedicated server.

Remember though that a VPS brings along some overhead... if a dedicated server can host, say, 500 domains -- that does not mean that you could run 2 VPS's on that dedicated server with 250 domains each.

Due to the overhead of the VPS's, you'd be running less total domains.

However, VPS's do have wonderful benefits, and many folks feel the overhead is worth it. But that depends on your circumstances.

In that case though -- you would indeed need a Virtualmin license for each VPS.

4) Is there a way to grow into a cloud server that might be a smarter way to go? My data center is SingleHop and they have what seems to be a pretty amazing cloud setup. However my sales rep is telling me I should stay old school and get more dedicated servers. He says the I/O times would be too slow for shared hosting. I can't tell if his advise is commission motivated of not. Should be be thinking about a Cloudmin/Virtualmin solution?

Well, it's completely incorrect to suggest that the IO for a VPS prevents you from doing shared hosting... I've seen VPS's handle shared hosting just fine.

Cloudmin is certainly an option you could consider -- if you have a dedicated server, it can provision VPS's on it.

Or, if you wanted to use Amazon's EC2, you could use Cloudmin to provision new EC2 instances.

I hope that helps get you started -- if you have additional questions, feel free to ask!

-Eric

Fri, 10/07/2011 - 11:24
webwzrd

Eric, Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I think this will come down to what will be cost effective. I love Virtualmin and think it's well worth the money, especially at the renewal rates. However it can get very expensive if I have a VM Pro version on two of more VPS's - even if some are smaller licenses. So this makes me think that if I got another server, I'm better off to resell it as a dedicated server or just let my resellers continue to have a reseller account within VM on the new server. This I can put my own overflow on it as well.

Here's what SingleHop said specifically about IO writing on their cloud setup:

"Cascade is a powerful and very flexible hosting platform. However, while it is possible to provide shared hosting on Cascade's cloud it is not designed to handle large numbers of shared accounts and we would actually not recommend the use of Cascade for this purpose. The system is focused on offering flexibility and scalability, and it is not tuned to offer the best shared hosting experience based on limitations that we have imposed on IO for the health of the entire system. Cascade gives you the ability to enjoy little to no downtime even when hardware failure takes place, and you can increase the amount of resources that you need on the fly. But beyond a few VPS machines running on your server, large scale shared hosting is not what it was designed for. "

I assuming then that EC2 must be setup differently without similar imposed limitations. I needs some honest opinions here... is EC2 really a good way to go? Are there some web hosts that use EC2 exclusively? Are there any drawbacks? Do I even need SingleHop at all?

Although I can't seem to find it now, did I read somewhere that I can create an EC2 instance with Virtualmin Pro pre-installed and just pay a monthly fee for the use of Virtualmin?

Fri, 10/07/2011 - 12:10
andreychek

Howdy,

Well, EC2 is largely a Xen-based VPS, where you have some flexibility in terms of the resources you have.

EC2 also makes it easy to provision new instances.

The big benefit there is that you don't have to worry about the dedicated server that runs underneath the VPS -- Amazon worries about that. If you run your own VPS's on dedicated servers that you manage, you have to be concerned about the hardware limitations of that dedicated server.

With EC2, you don't have to worry about that -- you simply worry about the resources available in one EC2 instance, and you can simply launch another if you ever need it (such as for your reseller).

If you're using EC2 -- you don't need another provider. You can launch an EC2 instance, and run Cloudmin on there, which would be capable of launching additional EC2 instances.

Alternatively, if you don't want to use Cloudmin -- you could simply purchase a set of dedicated servers or even some beefy VPS's.

For example, I've had good experiences with Linode -- and if you wanted to split your 230 domains across 2 Linode VPS's, I've seen folks host over a hundred domains on a single Linode (though, that of course depends on the domains being hosted). Linode is just one example though.

As for your last question -- there are indeed EC2 instances with Virtualmin Pro and GPL. You can read about those here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/aws

Sun, 10/23/2011 - 12:21
kenlyle

Thanks for this discussion thread.

I was thinking on a similar line recently, and am considering Nimbula, which is a bare metal KVM system with, I think RedHat or CentOS as the base. What they say is that you create your first node from an .iso, then the next members of the cluster PXE boot from that node, and you're off and running. Nimbula's main admin feature seems to be managing images, and who can do what with those images. Their tagline is like "providing EC2-like services behind your firewall". A few of the founders seem to be EC2 principals.

So, given a way to bring up new servers just by "racking them into the same subnet", and spinning up new images, it seems that Virtualmin on those images, with Cloudmin to manage would be a good setup. A WHMCS shopping cart can provision virtual servers using a Server Template. Cloudmin says that it will let you move virtual servers from one Vmin instance to another. True? Then, the only thing missing would be some automation, like if a VS uses a lot of resources, move them to a new (node | VPS ). Can Cloudmin do anything like that?

If you happen to know of a datacenter with lots of really cheap commodity servers, and I think I do, then it should be possible to build up quite a little farm, pretty quickly, at reasonable cost. The commodity servers have to be -V or -VT capable, though. In at least one video, I heard the Nimbula guy say that they have an HCL, but the docs, several of them only say -V or -VT.

I'd like to know what you guys think. Sorry if this seems like a hijack, but I thought it relevant, and timely.

Best, Ken

Mon, 10/24/2011 - 09:57
andreychek

Cloudmin says that it will let you move virtual servers from one Vmin instance to another. True?

True!

Then, the only thing missing would be some automation, like if a VS uses a lot of resources, move them to a new (node | VPS ). Can Cloudmin do anything like that?

That's a difficult problem to automate. The question would be, how do you determine when a VPS is using too many resources? What if it's a temporary problem, or something due to just running the backups?

That said -- you can setup auto-scale groups, per the documentation here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/cloudmin/scalegroups

It's also possible, from the command line, to use Cloudmin move a Virtual Server from one system to another. So you could automate that if you understood the parameters of how to decide when the resource usage was really too much.

To see available command line options, you can run the command "cloudmin" from the command line. You can also see the available options here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/cloudmin/devel/cli

Thu, 12/04/2014 - 00:53
nudrat

The most common certs are only good for one host, so if you generate your CSR with "ssl.domain.com" you'd want to use that host in the setup for your mail client.

The instructions listed here work flawlessly for adding a cert to a domain - plus the kluges for using a single cert for webmin and virtualmin work as well- however, in addition to setting up the domain itself, webmin, and virtualmin, I recommend adding the same SSL setting for the Usermin setup, too!

Tue, 12/09/2014 - 15:57
tpnsolutions
tpnsolutions's picture

Hi,

Another option to consider is splitting services across multiple nodes. That is, dedicated DNS cluster, dedicated email server(s), dedicated database server(s).

We've done all of the above in our infrastructure.

One of the benefits of this design is that you can optimize each node for it's specific task, therefore making each service run more smoother, and in some cases even saving on the hardware required for a specific node.

Ex. a dedicated DNS server doesn't generally need anymore than 1 - 2 GB to handle millions of queries.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to brainstorm a great architecture design in greater detail.

Best Regards,
Peter Knowles
TPN Solutions

Email: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com
Phone: 604-229-0715 (new)
Skype: tpnsupport
Website: http://www.tpnsolutions.com
Best Regards,
Peter Knowles | TPN Solutions
Email: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com | Skype: tpnassist
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