Decaflon Thread: Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?

Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?

montoya — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:43:12

Ozone: Hmm, that's some food for thought right there. That's the kind of numbers I needed to hear too. The sites I'm talking about are seriously lacking in optimization, but maybe if I can improve them, I'll be able to scale down the number of servers we have, or at least free up a lot of resources for new ones. Thanks for the advice.

Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?

Ozone42 — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:13:50

I have a few servers. On one server I run 60 sites. A couple sites on that one get 100-200k hits in a day. That server is an athlon 2200 with a gig of ram and non sata hard drives.

Another server I have only two sites. The reason I have that one is because the 60 site server I've deemed "full," I don't want to stretch it's resources any further.

Unless you're getting hammered, have a bad setup, or a runaway process, you really don't need that much power to serve websites, even highly interactive ones.

Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?

montoya — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:14:58

My thoughts were (just to provide a little more background):

- If each site is on its own server, it doesn't have to compete for RAM or CPU processes and if one site has issues, it won't affect the other two.

- If we get a big server that can more than handle these sites, then we can scale a bit better since we can add more sites on that server and still not have problems. (but this might not be true).

- I really can't tell the performance difference between the specs the one big server has and the specs of the smaller servers... I just want each site to be fast and handle all the traffic and then some.

Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?

montoya — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:12:51

I've hit a roadblock due to the fact that I don't know much about this problem so I'm looking to see if people with more experience can give me some advice:

What's better? I've got three sites, one gets 40k hit/day, another 15k, another 10k. They are not very well optimized but I'm working on that (adding caching, etc.). Say I could move all three sites to one very powerful server (2x Quad Core Xeon, SAS Drive, 2G RAM) or move each site to a separate "pretty-good" server (Dual Core Pentium D, SATA Drive, 1G RAM). All the other features are the same, OS setup, Fast CGI, APC/Cache::Cache, etc. These are Perl/PHP sites with MySQL backends.

Any advice?