Hosting question
 

First of all, I´m not a tech guy, so it may be a stupid question. I´m running some paid gallery spots. Some galleries are on a virtual dreamhost account, which didn´t cause any problems so far.

I used one of my servers for two galleries this month and the box melt down. I´ve got 15 mbps per month and didn´t use half of it, but the server couldn´t handle the traffic, which leads to my question:

What´s the reason if a dedicated server can´t handle gallery spots?

The hosting company recommended load balancing. But if I would use the suggested solution, it would hurt the ROI of the spots.|confused|

its all depent what dedicated host you have, i had one dutch host, who was a fucking moron,now getting dedicated for 2 galleries i dont get that part, i have alot of domains and sites spread over 4 host i still dont burn the gigs i buy there, not with the hun galleries or whatever, btw long time no see frank, waar ben jij all die tijd geweest, beste is als je host het niet aan kan om te verhuizen naar een andere host, probeer cd34 colo host, i mean cd34, from this board, he has virtual and dedicated hosting and is very good and trustfull:)))

Hi Stuv!!!

I´m running three servers, one older with my old sites, freesites and galleries, two new ones which I´m building a paysite on. So I usually use bangbros for paid spots and they offer free hosting, that´s why I didn´t need galleries running on one of my servers so far.

I tried new sponsors which do not offer free hosting, so I put the galleries on one of my boxes and they melt them down.

Thank´s for the hosting company, I´ll check it out.

"De website van Frank is gisterochtend door de enorme toeloop van bezoekers onbereikbaar geweest. Onze excuses daarvoor."|banghead|

Frank geeze try to prevent that part, thats the worse you can get in this bizz, it will cost you buyers, btw goed je weer te zien:))))

I had a lot of work to do, cause we bought a new house and everything which could go wrong did, lol. But now I´m back again, I hope so at least...

ah new house heay, congrats:) my experience with dutch hosting....they all suck, i keep my ass with the usa hosting, you have to check several other hostings, first dutch hosting is more expensieve then the deals in usa, now the euro is more worth then the dollar, so hosting is cheaper also in usa becaus of the dollar and to be honest, i have more fun using usa hosting then dutch, hell you should know the dutchies are not to be trusted:D, good your back in bizz, but check your hosting and move if needed:)

|bow|

Frank, I had a similar story last week. One of my galleries was listed on the Hun and I received an e-mail from my host, Dreamhost that an unusually large surge in ntraffic was causing their servers to crash.

It seems that they have 250 connections per machine to the net and my gallery was using them all. They applies a throttle limiting to 10 requests per sec.

Some also recommended putting the images on a separate subdomain eg) images.mydomain.com - seems like this would help the situation.

Question is , is Dreamhost up to Hun listings and secondly I am thinking of hosting images on a free host and hot linking. I am also looking at sponsor hosting for gallery listings?

Any comments/opinion on my options?

I have never tried Dreamhost but mostly what I have heard about them is bad. A subdomain would be no different than having the pics in a different directory...as long as it is on the same box it won't make a difference I don't believe. TGPs don't like anything hotlinked...even The HUN. You are on the right track Spock with using a sponsor or freehost with The HUN...reduces your risk greatly (it's only logical ;-).

Attached is a P3/800mhz with 512mb RAM, 80gb hard drive from a few years back.

Here's a dual core Opteron 275's bandwidth graph:
http://zeus1.kernel.org/bw-zeus1.png
http://zeus1.kernel.org/bw-zeus2.png (its sister machine)
(no, we don't host those)

Depending on what your galleries were doing, you can use a lot of CPU horsepower to serve 15mb/sec. If the pages are completely static, i.e. no php code, no server side includes, etc, then, there should be no problem with reasonable hardware being able to handle 15mb/sec. Even a moderate P4 with a 7200rpm drive would have no problem with 15mb/sec.

If you had a script on the page doing geoiplookups, or were doing some stat tracking on the page by loading some script that was inserting records into mysql, etc and the mysql server wasn't set up right, or there weren't proper indexes on the tables, it is very possible that you could easily overrun the hard drive.

Apache also has a problem with what is called the 'thundering herd'. When you get a massive influx of traffic, depending on how apache is configured, it might not be able to ramp up to the demand and will always be playing catch-up. Or worse, it will try to ramp up to meet demand, and fork processes more quickly than the machine can handle.

Quite a few possible scenarios -- only your current host can tell you what really happened.

I am not a big specialist on hosting but I had a few boxes with 15-50 mbps and never needed load balancing even when traffic was over 50 mbps. My servers are/were nothing special regarding disc size and CPU speed.

|spam|

That´s what I expected from my host. It should handle one single gallery listing on thehun properly. And it was an picture only gallery.

Thanks for the info: here are my graphs for the last week:

traffic graphs

You state above that you have 15mb/sec and that your gallery used half of that. 7mb/sec would be 7000kb/sec. Your weekly graph shows a peak at 800kb/sec -- which is about 5% of what your stated package is.

if your machine crumbled under that load, there is something seriously wrong with the configuration.

Could you please hit me up on ICQ?

154723327

My galleries are movie galleries with 3x1.5MB movies. Never had an issue with server overload - only with bandwidth overage :D

I have had several of my free sites listed on The Hun, and crap loads of traffic to my servers on Dreamhost and never had a problem other than that they are a bit slow at times, but not even that often

IMHO it certainly is the way that the server is setup and the way the host manages the load. We have managed shared server with HUN listings for a very long time. Granted they can load up the server but we would either wind up moving the client onto a less populated server or upgrading to a dedicated server when the time was right based on the consistency of the load.

There are a lot of quality hosts here and this is why they have a technical staff monitoring their networks and server 24/7, onsite. While I would always recommend maintaining good levels of communications with your host when the possibility exists that you may generate a lot of traffic, the host should also be ready to react on the fly as traffic loads change.|goodidea

To clarify, I´have not a problem with listings at my dreamhost virtual account. The problem is on my other host where I´m running htree dedicated boxes.

LOL, but OK... Bandwidth is another question, but I think a dedicated box should handle a listing properly, especially if a virtual account on dreamhost does it with a movie gallery.|bananna|

Yeah something's not right there. I have a 10mbps dedicated server and I submit a lot and handle a lot of traffic. In fact I think I might need to upgrade to 25mbps.

I am always happy to hear of a potential client growing but would you mind me asking what you are basing the thought that you might need to upgrade on?

1. Are you experiencing any particular difficulties?
2. Are you being charged for overages?

I hope you won't mind me being curious.

Where are you hosting at?

For the first time I'm hitting overrages, but I've been submitting a lot of movie galleries lately.