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Looking for a New Server
| Posted by r.b., 10-07-2016, 09:34 PM |
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Hello, everyone,
I suddenly find myself in the market for a new server. I upgraded to ASSP 2.x and it is really putting a strain on my old Xeon E3-1270v2 that I have with SoftLayer. I've spent the last eight years with SoftLayer and the four years before that with the Planet. I was happy with the Planet and even happier with SoftLayer (both before and after those two later merged). Given that I've had good success with SoftLayer, I was planning to go back. But, it seems since IBM purchased SL, they aren't in the mood to be quite as competitive on price. Right now, I'm paying $189 for an E3-1270v2 with 16GB of RAM, 2x1TB hard drives on a hardware RAID, RHEL 6, cPanel, service monitoring (not management), etc. It was a pretty good deal 4 years ago, but I was shocked to hear that even an incremental upgrade to an E3-1270v3 would rocket my price to $439/month.
SoftLayer has been great, but it is time to move on I guess. Is there a good provider out there that will be reliable (like SoftLayer), have fast support (like SoftLayer), but that will offer pricing more like the scrappy, young SoftLayer of yesteryear?
Right now, it isn't uncommon for 3 of my four cores on the processor to be at 100% and the remaining one to be at 70%, so I definitely need something more modern. I'd really like a processor in the last generation or two of Intel's roadmap, rather than looking at something from 2012 or 2013.
Thanks,
Tim
P.S. Sorry for posting from an account with no history -- I can't seem to login to my longtime WHT account any longer. This one I apparently registered 15 years ago and then promptly forgot about, but -- ironically -- I could get into.
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| Posted by SH-Admin, 10-07-2016, 10:02 PM |
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I agree that since SL was taken over by IBM their price are not being so reasonable if compare with the budget. do you have any location preferences for this new server you are looking for and if you can share the exact config in terms of HDD , RAM , Bandwidth etc.. would be good. If you are behind cheap server then you will have too many providers however not sure how the quality of the support and other stuff will be . But there are few data centers who can really meet your requirements .. such as Hivelocity , SingleHope and PEER1 so you can try these guys.
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| Posted by Postbox, 10-07-2016, 10:19 PM |
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Haven't we just been working on that with you?
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| Posted by r.b., 10-07-2016, 10:25 PM |
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Yup. That's me -- I posted this before I saw your reply! I had no idea I'd get help getting into my old account so quickly, so when logging into this one worked... Thanks again for your help.
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| Posted by PWSupport, 10-07-2016, 10:26 PM |
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There are many providers but which location you would like to have?
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| Posted by Postbox, 10-07-2016, 10:28 PM |
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OK, we'll use the same ticket to fix this too. You do remember that in 2001 you agreed to only having one account here, right? No excuses about sleeping since, or conundrums, please.
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| Posted by r.b., 10-07-2016, 10:29 PM |
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Thanks, SH-Admin. I'll check out the companies you mentioned. Here's what I'm looking for (basically, what I have now with enhancements primarily to the processor):
- Something that is a notable step up from an E3-1270v2
- At least 16GB of RAM
- At least 2x1TB hard drives or a somewhat smaller SSD setup on a hardware RAID
- RHEL 7 or CentOS 7 with cPanel
- Ping monitoring, remote reboot (and, optionally but nice, remote KVM).
- At least 1TB-2TB of bandwidth (I use about 600GB right now, but I'd like to play it safe)
- 1Gbit connection
Thanks!
Tim
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-07-2016, 10:32 PM |
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Depending on your application it might make sense to go to 32GB of ram, as with asp as you start to run of memory the CPU load typically goes up as well.
Also if you can afford to use lower disk space, SSD drives might be beneficial to you.
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| Posted by r.b., 10-07-2016, 10:58 PM |
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I do! I actually didn't recall having a second account and was surprised when the password reminder gave me this account rather than the expected one. I'll get logged into the other account and behave myself without any conundrums! ;-)
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| Posted by uninet, 10-07-2016, 11:13 PM |
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I'm looking for something in the U.S. I've alternated between Dallas and Washington, D.C. with the Planet and SoftLayer -- those both worked well for me. I'm in Missouri, so Dallas or thereabouts probably makes the most sense, but I am not particular as long as it has good connectivity.
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| Posted by uninet, 10-07-2016, 11:39 PM |
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That makes sense. Thank you, Tony. As much as I always love having extra space, I think the SSDs do sound awfully sensible.
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-08-2016, 12:22 AM |
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When it comes to web applications there are many things that can cause the CPU load to go up, and while its all related to traffic, you need to consider all variables. When the CPU load goes high, what is going on with RAM, Disk I/O, and even network traffic if the Network card is software based on the motherboard, so uses CPU cycles.
Having worked with the Xeon CPUs for a long time, just changing to ASSP 2.x should not have caused your load to dramatically change, without some other changes in the server. Did you dramatically change your rules with this upgrade? Did you change the number of user's accounts? etc?
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| Posted by ayksolutions, 10-08-2016, 09:29 AM |
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I think you will find that there are a lot of providers in the Dallas area and quite a few in the DC market. If you want to stay with the bigger companies, perhaps someone like Limestone in Dallas or PhoenixNap in Ashburn may be of good use. However don't discount smaller companies as the level of service there can be a lot more personal and more professional since you will be dealing with the same several people over and over.
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| Posted by uninet, 10-08-2016, 05:06 PM |
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I think it is two things, actually, nearest as I've been able to discern, but all of it comes down to MySQL/MariaDB. Right now, MariaDB is using 200% CPU and I don't think there are any corrupt tables, etc. With ASSP 2.x, I moved ASSP onto MariaDB and that seems to use a lot of resources by itself.
I also run an RSS news reader that craws a list of newsfeeds and updates itself throughout the day; I recently made it multithreaded (4 threads), so now it has become more of a resource hog, too. I think it is relatively efficient, as far as I can tell.
Maybe I'm missing something? Or maybe MariaDB isn't happy without more RAM?
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| Posted by uninet, 10-08-2016, 09:32 PM |
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I've been talking to HiVelocity and they recommended one of their Xeon D-1540 servers. It looks nice -- it has 24GB of RAM and an SSD -- and would be a bit cheaper than I'm paying now. On the flip side, it looks like the D-1540 is only about 10% faster than my current processor, which doesn't seem like it would help all that much. Any thoughts?
iWebFusion has an insanely good price on an 2x E5-2650 posted on WHT's deals forum ($162 with 128GB of RAM, 4x 500GB SSD, etc.). But, I'm wary of insanely good deals...
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-08-2016, 09:39 PM |
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If Maria is running out of ram, it will spike the CPU very quickly. You want to read up on some tweaks to MariaDB as while a standard MySQL configuration will work, it's not always ideal.
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| Posted by uninet, 10-08-2016, 10:06 PM |
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Thanks, Tony. It looks like right now less than half of my 16GB of RAM is in use, but MariaDB is using 200% CPU. I'll have to look into some optimization techniques again. I've not had much success in past attempts, but maybe I'm missing something.
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-08-2016, 10:18 PM |
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Make sure you have it configured to be multi threaded correctly. This is a common mistake that can cause issues configuration.
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| Posted by SenseiSteve, 10-10-2016, 02:12 PM |
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I would agree that $162 for a server with those specs is insanely cheap. The deal at HiVelocity looks good, but you didn't mention the capacity of the SSD.
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| Posted by uninet, 10-10-2016, 03:06 PM |
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It is a 480GB SSD alongside a 1TB HDD. It is $210/month, but if you prepay for a year, it would reduce the price to $168/month.
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| Posted by HostWithLove_Cody, 10-10-2016, 04:29 PM |
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It looks like some optimization to your MySQL configuration file may work wonders. Just a heads-up, HostDime provides fully managed services and can definitely review your MySQL configurations and make adjustments for you. We work with them in several locations, and their support has always gone the extra mile for us. They can also price-match/beat any specifications that you are currently paying SoftLayer for.
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| Posted by SenseiSteve, 10-10-2016, 04:37 PM |
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Yeah, that makes more sense. That's a pretty fair amount of savings.
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| Posted by ayksolutions, 10-11-2016, 12:47 PM |
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HiVelocity I believe is a good provider from what I have seen. We have yet to actually use them but their Sales team has been very responsive and professional. Same goes for Hostdime, the only issue with Hostdime for us is how they package their bandwidth. Using 95th with dedicated servers is always a pain and that's what they offer across the board I believe which always prevented us from going with them.
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| Posted by HostWithLove_Cody, 10-11-2016, 01:21 PM |
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How much bandwidth do you require? HostDime has been pretty flexible/generous in giving slightly larger bandwidth allowances if you are purchasing multiple servers from them. It would in most cases mitigate the concern of their 95th percentile calculation.
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| Posted by ayksolutions, 10-11-2016, 01:39 PM |
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I don't want to hijack the thread but I have asked them several times if they can just do flat bandwidth packages like everyone else provides, unfortunately it was not possible.
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| Posted by HostDime, 10-12-2016, 03:44 PM |
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Agreed lets not hijack but lets talk!
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| Posted by LiteHostCO, 10-13-2016, 06:06 PM |
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Try searching into the advertisement forums
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| Posted by uninet, 10-20-2016, 12:07 AM |
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Thanks so much for the suggestion, Tony. I've gone through a several cycles of adjusting settings, and then running MySQL Tuner, adjusting, and then doing it over again. I'm happy to say MariaDB has all but dropped off of map as far as resource usage goes.
I'm still wondering if it might be a good time to jump to a better server, though. I just happened to see an ad for ReliableServers. It looks like aggressive pricing. HiVelocity and HostDime still intrigue me, too. Any thoughts on how they all compare? Does a provider like HiVelocity compare well against SoftLayer in terms of data center quality, etc.?
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-20-2016, 12:55 AM |
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Glad to hear you got things optimizied. Configuring MySQL or MariaDB can be a lot of work to find the right balance of performance and resource usage. Settings things to far in one direction or the other can greatly effect the scale one one or other.
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E...eon-E3-1270-v2
If you compare the latest CPU E3-1270v5 to your E3-1270v2, you will see about a 20% speed increase. But you also benefit from the upgrade of DDR4 Ram as well as the ability to goto 64GB max.
CPU Boss doesnt allow you to compare to the E3-1240 v5 as its not in their database yet, but even if you compare it to last year model (E3-1241 v3) you see a speed increase over your E3-1270v2, so you can only imagine what a E3-1240v5 with DDR4 could out preform your E3-1270v2.
You are dealing with 4year old technology and the average life span of a server these days is considered 3-5 years by most professionals. So upgrading to a new E3-12xx v5 could be beneficial to you. Then if you add in SSDs to the mix with the improvements in Centos 7.x and your latest tweaks I think you could see some real improvements.
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| Posted by uninet, 10-20-2016, 06:47 PM |
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Thanks so much again for your help, Tony. That was what I was thinking, too. I've really liked being on a four year upgrade cycle. And, I don't like pushing mechanical drives much beyond that for something I'm super dependent on (like my hosting server!).
Question: I know you can't directly advocate for your own services unless I ask. So, I do have a question about madRooster.com. It looks like your prices have management built in. Do you ever offer a lower price for a server without management? I see that one can choose self-managed, but the price seemed to stay the same. It looks like your prices come out a bit more than HiVelocity, but HiVelocity is self-managed, so it isn't a fair comparison.
Thanks!
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-20-2016, 07:15 PM |
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Thank you for your question. We do not have a discount for unmanaged, as if you notice on our management tab our management is limited to our supported software packages or 1 hour a month for other services before an additional fee is charged. We offer the other management options for those clients that do not want us involved in their server unless specifically asked. This is for those clients that want to maintain their own security patches, etc.
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