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How would you host this?
| Posted by AHFBWEB, 04-12-2015, 08:53 PM |
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If you had the #1 largest vBulletin forum in the world, how would you host it?
I cannot go into too many details for legal reasons but here is the brief.
I am working on a big deal and need some advice. I run a very large VB forum(multiples bigger than WHT) and we are getting ready to have a growth explosion.
We are preparing to sign a contract with a producer to bring our site to a well known TV network. I need a server able to handle huge vb traffic without blinking. Actually my plan is to hire a company to run stress tests to simulate 1,000,000 or more daily visitors. More importantly, to stress for up to 500,000 at a time(peak 3 times in 1 day, 1 day every week)
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| Posted by bobey, 04-12-2015, 10:31 PM |
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how big is your site My suggest for this yumi is Best host, most expensive host
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| Posted by ReliableSite, 04-12-2015, 10:38 PM |
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Multiple servers, it's going to be very heavy on the disks and CPU.
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| Posted by HRoot_Inc, 04-12-2015, 11:24 PM |
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+1.
Go with 3-4 E5s and SSDs, highly optimized, should be good enough.
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| Posted by Dedispec, 04-12-2015, 11:47 PM |
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Definitely agree, you'll want multiple servers for this kind of operation. Make sure you have a strong IO setup with RAID as well as strong CPUs, obviously there will be other areas to touch on as well. Make sure you have some redundancy in place to avoid any problems as well, even at the best hosts you should have a backup plan in place, especially for how large it sounds like you.
Best of luck, sounds exciting!
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| Posted by 24x7group, 04-13-2015, 06:15 AM |
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A load-balanced solution might be the best way to go, so you can easily scale up/down if needed.
Can you give us some insight on what it's hosted on right now? We can then think with you based on that.
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| Posted by RDO Servers, 04-13-2015, 06:28 AM |
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I agree with multiple load balanced servers. E4 or E5. SSD's. If your looking at that much traffic, and presumably making money off this site, I would also look into having the servers in different datacenters.
Make sure you also have good DDoS protection as a larger site makes you more of a target.
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| Posted by AHFBWEB, 04-13-2015, 09:15 AM |
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I was thinking at first 1 or maybe 2
E5 2650 V3
256 M DDR4
4 - 1T SSD
SW raid 1+0
seems 1 is out of the question.
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| Posted by Steven F, 04-13-2015, 09:44 AM |
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If you already host the forum, then you should have an idea as to what you'd need to support additional users.
Typically, on such a large forum, you'd be making five figures plus monthly in advertising revenues and what-have-you. Given that you're making so much money, protecting your investment with a proper deployment would make the most sense. That includes a load balanced cluster, in most cases.
The beauty of a load balanced cluster is the ease in which you can add additional capacity. It'd start out with 6 servers. 2 balancers, 2 web servers, and 2 database servers. From there, it could grow and become much more complex.
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| Posted by RDO Servers, 04-13-2015, 10:48 AM |
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I would not put that much traffic on one server, no matter how powerful it is!
You always better off with 2 load balanced servers, with half the power, the one server that is twice as powerful. You do not what a site with that much traffic to go offline for hours because your only server crashed.
I would do (at a minimum)
1 load balancer
2 web servers
1 database server
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| Posted by AHFBWEB, 04-13-2015, 11:18 AM |
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So does 6 - 8000 sound like a fair budget?
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| Posted by RDO Servers, 04-13-2015, 12:43 PM |
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6k - 8k month, yes plenty. Per year, not for that setup.
If you can clarify your budget, we can suggest a solution for your budget
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| Posted by kerry_1, 04-13-2015, 12:50 PM |
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Assuming there's a lot of drive-by/curiosity visitors, caching pages for visitors that are not logged in would probably buy you the most bang for the buck. There are some specific changes you can do around cookies that make VB work well with varnish.
For many sites, that can drastically reduce the hardware requirements.
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| Posted by CooliceHost, 04-13-2015, 01:27 PM |
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~10% percent of the size of WHT vBulletin forum with up to 450 online users on peak hours (which is ~20% of WHT online users) fits and keep it cold (load very rarely go over 1.00 -usually is 0.3-0.5) 2 x CPU @ 3.4 Ghz, 4 GB RAM Pure SSD not oversold server (got 3 VMs on node)
Pure Nginx + PHP-FPM + MariaDB 5.5 with TokuDB plugin enabled (2GB of 4 GB RAM is for TokuDB Buffer) http://www.tokutek.com/tokudb-for-mysql/
@OP how times bigger than WHT forum do you mean? How many users online?
I recommend pure Nginx, SSD and TokuDB storage engine...
P.S Vbulletin support reads from multiple slave DBs so it will be good spread the load
Last edited by CooliceHost; 04-13-2015 at 01:38 PM.
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| Posted by XavierM, 04-13-2015, 01:28 PM |
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Yes, that would be a reasonable budget. Definitely a server cluster so resources are distributed and network load balanced. Depending on more details like the site load, I would recommend 3-4 E5 in RAID 10 with lots of RAM Sounds like fun!
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| Posted by MrPiang, 04-13-2015, 02:23 PM |
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2 E5 Servers with pure SSD storage w Hardware RAID will do the job. However highly recommend you go for multiple servers to handles different task such as 1) DB Server 2) Web Server 3) Mail Server and so on.
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| Posted by AMJAlienServers, 04-13-2015, 03:10 PM |
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You would need a server cluster of 4-6 servers so you are not going to risk going offline and also a good ddos protection...
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| Posted by DarrenShakes, 04-13-2015, 06:25 PM |
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You will need multiple dedicated servers serving different tasks including caching, web front ends, a cluster database system, and great backups.
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| Posted by Steven F, 04-13-2015, 08:05 PM |
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Again, that would really depend on your setup and what you're looking for. It would probably be fine to build a basic cluster with a reliable provider, but there's more to it. You need to make sure you can scale up and out, as well as get proper support.
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| Posted by AHFBWEB, 09-30-2016, 02:41 PM |
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Well it has been over 2 years in the making but the tv show is ready to debut on November 5th << snipped >>
There have been some great replies on this thread (I had no idea it had got featured), I had not visited it much as the show kept getting delayed. I had no idea it took so long to get a tv show to air.
I have to admit I knew the numbers in my op were over inflated but I have to go with what I am given. At last ,we have more reasonable numbers to work with. We originally hoped for a Thursday evening show, the traffic would be huge. It turns out the show will be on Saturday evenings, quite the contrast to Thursdays. The numbers I have to work with, they assume 500,000 tv viewers and expect about 10% to visit the website within the hour of and hour after the show, so 50,000 over a 2 hour period.
In my mind I am thinking of going with mid level servers
1- db
1- load balancer
2- web server
Of course my budget has dropped to less than half of my op.
What hardware would you go with?
Last edited by Ash; 09-30-2016 at 03:03 PM.
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| Posted by AHFBWEB, 09-30-2016, 02:58 PM |
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Sorry was to late to edit the post.
Wanted to add that the db stays at 75% read 25% write and the site is a vbulletin 4
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| Posted by SenseiSteve, 09-30-2016, 05:13 PM |
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Congrats on the show finally going forward.
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| Posted by KaliLove, 10-13-2016, 12:41 AM |
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I would set up 2 dedicated machines and 2 cloud/virtual machines.
Cloud 1: DNS Only
Cloud 2: Email Only
Dedicated 1: Web/HTTP oriented
Dedicated 2: Database only (In the same data center as dedicated 1, preferably the same rack cabinet)
Of course, you would want to scale each machine's resources according to your needs. Also, keep in mind, going cloud with the DNS Only server may speed up DNS resolution depending on your host.
After you've set everything else up, it would be wise to implement a CDN such as CloudFlare to further load balance and increase the availability of your site(s).
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| Posted by madRoosterTony, 10-13-2016, 01:57 AM |
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I am a big fan of more smaller servers then a couple larger servers. The reason being is it gives you more redundancy, plus often allows you to spread the load to multiple locations, so that if a data center is having issues, you are not 100% down, just slower.
I would look at a min of 4 servers or even 8 - 10+ VPSes depending on requirements.
This would give you dedicated web and database servers. That you could even put in separate data centers, then using Anycast IPs you could distribute load between the servers.
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| Posted by ServerManagement, 10-13-2016, 08:30 AM |
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All the suggestions are great but without knowing the actual traffic/resource demand, there is no way to give you exact recommendations. Be careful building a solution from suggestions given without telling them what you are really doing. This is not a small project, you don't want to build an entire infrastructure just to find out that it can't really handle it.
Just the number of hits does 'not' really tell you how much cpu/mem will be needed. When you are trying to build a concrete fail proof solution, you need more than just an estimated number of "hits". The size of the db matters, the type of pages (ie, mostly static pages, video downloads, php/mysql forums, etc), etc.
We give recommendations all the time and most of the time, the traffic they estimate is always less than what they wind up getting, and the resource intensiveness of the traffic always winds up being more than they expected. For a large setup like this, you need to have someone analyze what you need and build a plan for you that includes handling your expected traffic, AND growth, spikes, attacks, backups, etc. A mission critical site like you are talking about with the amount of traffic you mentioned needs more than just saying "get X number of servers with an SSD drive and Xeon cpu with 32gig of ram...."
Also, if you are on a budget, there's several ways to keep costs down with services like 3rd party dns, 3rd party email, 3rd party proxy/cdn, etc.
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