Hey all,

Here's my deal:

I host 4 Wordpress sites currently. Between all 4 sites, I get anywhere from 300-2500 unique visitors a day. Right now, I only require about 2 GB of space and about 25 GB monthly transfer.

I used to run a number of high volume proxy sites, but I have since sold my network of sites. Therefore, I am currently sitting on a dedicated machine, paying $134.99, however my current specs are:

Core2Quad Q9300
8 GB RAM
750GB SATA
10mbps Unmetered Connection

Clearly, this is way overkill for my Wordpress sites. I've read awesome reviews about Linode, and I'm looking to "downgrade" to a VPS. However, a VPS should be more than enough for what I need. I guess my main question is, how much RAM would I need? I'd like some room for a small bit of expansion in the future as well, preferably without upgrading plans. (Even though it can be done on the fly)

Would I be better off with a 540 or 720 plan?

Questions #2: Currently I host my own DNS server, and have a block of 8 IP's. I understand Linode offers DNS hosting, but I'd like to have complete control of my DNS for the time being. My plan was to buy a 2nd IP, create 2 nameservers, and host my own BIND.

What do most people do when it comes to DNS? Host their own, or use Linode's DNS service?


On my current dedicated, I have optimized Apache a small bit, but haven't really touched MySQL or the like. However, I'm definitely up for learning how, as moving to a VPS would clearly save me around $100 a month, which comes down to almost $1200 a year!

Thanks in advance,
Ace
Future Linode Customer

<snippy snip>



With halfway-decent optimization, a 360 would be fine for this.



Linode's DNS manager is advanced enough for the vast majority of users; unless you have very advanced or unusual requirements, it should be enough. However...

You can have the best of both worlds: Run your own DNS server, and set up Linode's DNS manager to slave off of it.

(Me, I run NSD on my node with Linode's servers as slaves because I have an unusal requirement that Linode's DNS manager doesn't meet: PTR records, for my HE-issued /64's reverse DNS.)

Edit: (To be clear, Linode's servers handle basically anything when slaving, even record types that the DNS manager doesn't support. Such as PTR. [Also to be clear, rDNS for your Linode-issued IPs is managed separately, so PTR records are not commonly needed. They give you a web UI; you don't run the nameservers for the in-addr.arpa zone yourself.])

Edit: All of that explaining probably made things less clear. Oops.

Edit: Typo.

Really? (That's good! )

If I had a VPS with more memory, would that allow things to run faster? Or would I see no real advantage? (In theory the OS would cache more RAM, and processes should execute faster...)

Maybe I'll sign up for a 360 plan later tonight...I figure I can always bump it up to a 540, etc.

It's hard to say... As long as your system is generally responsive, who cares if that backup script you run once a month (;)) gets bumped out of the cache and takes 1.5 seconds longer to start? I don't think it's worth getting a larger Linode just for that.

Yep - upgrades are a cinch. They do require downtime (just enough time to copy your disk images between hosts), but migrating a 360 should be quick - 10 minutes or so perhaps.

Well I signed up for a 360 plan.

so far things are running awesome! I've deployed Ubuntu 9.10 x64, and have created 3 disk images:

OS - 2GB
Swap - 256MB
/var - 5GB

I basically created the /var partition afterwards, booted into single user mode, mounted, copied /var directory over, then edited my fstab to mount the partition during normal boot.

I've read quite a debate on the 32 vs. 64 bit issue here on Linode. I have always ran 64 bit OS's in the past, and I'm not really looking to break my streak now. (64 bit FTW!)

With mysql, apache2, php5 and a few other goodies installed, my memory usage is:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           343        313         29          0         19        205
-/+ buffers/cache:         88        254
Swap:          255          0        255

This is without any sites loaded yet, just the VPS idling.

I'm sure you've seen it in the existing threads here, but I don't quite see what you're getting out of a 64-bit environment other than increased memory usage? That's really a big negative in a VPS environment (relatively memory constrained, and high overhead for swapping), so unless you have a specific application that gets a serious boost in performance from a 64-bit environment (not all that common), you're probably not getting any benefit - just negatives - from using the 64-bit environment.

-- David

I did some more reading...


Just switched from 64 to 32 bit..

Running Ubuntu 9.10 x86

(luckily i hadn't really setup much)

You may want to try Lighttpd or nginx to reduce memory usage from the web server.

Just an update to this thread:

I've had my Linode 360 for a little over a month now. I've been running Ubuntu Server 8.04 x86. So far, it's been awesome!

Linode's DNS service is also great and works very well. I'm currently hosting 3-4 sites which receive all together about 5,000 visitors a day now. I've been using SSH and Webmin to administer things, and performance of the 360 has been awesome!

Thank you for the updates, Acejam. It's nice to learn how things work out.

Nice!

Seconded. The only reason I'd use Apache was if I needed per-request .htaccess (like for shared hosting) or something I really needed and existed only with Apache. So far lighty does everything I need, and I'm considering giving nginx a try.