Dedicated Power and Cost - our sites our down

Hi there,

I am in murky waters. Our forum is down after moving both our sites (a forum and a wordpress blog) to a VPS, we cannot stay afloat. I don't know anything about Dedicated servers.

What I do know is this. I am being told I need to move to one because the resources we get with a Dedicated are not enough for both of our sites.

1. My files are already with this host and to move to dedicated will require nothing more than them moving them for me, which, in my current real life, is a good thing since I am unemployed and need to spend my time looking for work.

2. This is what they are telling me.
Intel Pentium-D 945+ 3.4 GHz
RAM: 2 GB Kingston DDR2 667 MHz
Primary HD: 250 GB SATA II
Second HD: 250 GB SATA II
+cPanel License
Fully Managed

$215.95/month

3. Where I am knowledge-wise is... overwhelmed. I cannot even imagine how much work or what I would need to do to move our forum and our wordpress blog, so my priority is getting up and running.

Okay, throw things, but be gentle.

Some of you have said known hosting, it appears their plans are comparable?

 

Ugh. I'm sorry to hear about all of these horrendous experiences you've been dealing with.

Making the move over to your own dedicated server will be beneficial to both you and your community. You can only stick with a virtual machine for a certain period of time before the resources delegated to the container begin to decrease rapidly. Yes; a virtual private server will provide you with an environment superior to that of a standard shared account. In the end, you're still being hosted on a hardware machine that has been split into various "containers" (i.e. multiple VPS').

The dedicated server configuration recommended is not too shabby, however, I'd build a machine that has a bit more power, particularly for a community of your size. I'd also purchase a machine that utilizes a Dual or Quad Core (or, a Dual Quad Core for superior processing power) - the recommended server configuration that your current provider suggested is rather outdated (somewhat... not entirely). In addition, a machine with 4GB of DDR2 RAM would assist quite a bit in terms of overall performance.

What are you willing to spend on this machine?

 

I am trying to find out what the people who are going to help support it are willing to do.

 

Keep us posted.

Regardless of who you choose to purchase your server from, the migration process is fairly simple. The account(s) is/are transferred from your former machine over to the new server (usually via WHM), and depending on the size of the account, the process can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. The transfer itself is simple; the wait can require some patience.

Once all of the major changes are made (and your account is safely migrated over), you should be good to go.

 

Wow I am so sorry to read about all of these troubles you're having.
Yes KnownHost is an excellent host. They do have managed dedicated servers as well.

 

Thanks you guys. I feel like I am having a baby or something.

We are going to go with that plan for now because we need our sites back up. Right now, the forum is on maintenance, and the VPS seems to handle the blog section of the site okay by itself.

I am only just going to cross my fingers and hope and pray that the dedicated server does the trick to get us through the next month at least, past their album launch.

 

Best of luck! I'm sure it'll work out for 'ya.

 

2 gigs of memory for $215 a month??? That is a little high, in fact its a lot high. And the memory is only 667 mhz?? Is the server like 5 years old or something?

Before you move to a dedicated server, what are your traffic stats? How big of a site do you have? What are your VPS stats? How much memory are you supposed to have and how many page views is your site getting every month?

There are a couple of red flags here,

A vps that can not handle a forum and a single wordpress blog? Unless your getting around 3 million page views a month you should not be having a problem.

It sounds like the hosting provider is trying to upsale you. At a cost of $215 a month, that is a little high.

 

WOW - I have 3 forums and 2 blogs on my vps, with no problems whatsoever.

 

Yeah, I have a feeling someone is taking you for a ride. Who is your current host, and what is your current site. How many users online at one time do you have, and do you have a lot of modifications installed?

More importantly have you or anyone you hired/runs the server ever optimized it. When you get a VPS it comes with plan default settings that aren't ideal for hosting anything over 300 uniques a day, but if you get the my.cnf tweaked, httpd.conf, php.ini, and a few other system files you can easily, easily serve over 2-3k unique visitors daily on a decent VPS

 

These are our stats for the month of August on the WP blog and forum.
Visits 110K
Visitors 277k
Pages 4.9M
Hits 31M
Bandwidth 207 GB

These are the VPS stats:
2 x Intel Xeon E5520 2.26GHz Quad-Core Processors (8 CPUs)
Kingston DDR3-1066 Fully Buffered 1066MHz ECC RAM
16 x Seagate Cheetah 15,000-RPM SAS Hard Drives (RAID-10)
Memory: 1024MB
Disk Space: 40GB
Bandwidth: 1,500 GB

When we tried moving the blog and forum to the VPS, it immediately overdosed the servers.

Right now, the blog is running peacefully alone on the VPS, but it could not handle both.

These are the stats of the blog alone on the VPS right now for 3 days.
Unique/Visits/Pages/Hits/BW
9,683/16,532/116,605/701,045/10.22 GB

I had them commence the move to the dedicated because we need to get back up and running and right now, our forum is dead in the water during a highly critical time. We are a band fanclub and their single is coming out this week. We felt we could get going and make a shopping choice once we were running again.

The number of unique visits from jumped from 60k in July to 110k in August, and I would not be surprised to see that kind of crazy growth in the following months.

Thanks for your help and patience with me as I am blindfolded in a dark room.

 

At 4.9 million page views for the month of august, your way overdue for a dedicated server. But, a dedicated with 2 gigs of memory may not cut it.

You should really consider a server with 4 gigs of memory, SATA hardrives and least a dual core processor. Which the dual core processor is a given these days - unless your host is reselling really old servers.

 

Thank you.

As you can imagine, going from sharing to dedicated so quickly has me quite overwhelmed and nervous as I do not know what to expect and our "in-between" move to VPS was a disaster.

For now, we are moving to the single processor just so our sites can get back up and assess our needs and do some shopping for a better host within the budget, etc. It may be that we end up not being able to support our forum and can only keep the blog which would be devastating.

 

:o

I am losing my mind.

We moved to:

Core i7 920 cpu
6GB Kingston RAM
500GB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 HD

and we had 200 people online and were still pushing our server load into the red?

What the heck do people who have thousands online at the same time do?

:shrug:

 

Would you be able to provide us with a screenshot of your current server status (assuming that you use cPanel/WHM)?

 

Here it is.

Of course, we are also running the WP blog on here and I am asking the tech guys how I can tell how many are online at that part of the domain.