March 16, 2009 at 10:34Let's share the experience. How to improve the quality of hosting for web design studio clients?
My name is Denis, I represent a small team from Rostov-on-Don. We studied the problem quite seriously, therefore there are quite a lot of letters under the habrakat :), but unfortunately, we did not find “our solution”, so I decided to write to this blog.
I think no one needs to be convinced that a good site is not only a beautiful functional design, a convenient management system, extremely complete statistics, transparency for search engines ... it is also a fast, reliable and high-quality hosting.
Looking ahead a bit, I’ll say. The most tempting solution is to buy and install your own server. The only thing that keeps us from this step is the doubt that we are able to independently provide a high level of security and reliability for the projects being placed.
Currently, we place all our clients on the virtual platforms of Masterhost. (Hereinafter, the name of a given company will quite often “pop up” ... This is not advertising, nor anti-advertising - it’s just a completely substantive question, but as usual, words cannot be erased.) So, we never hid from clients where we place projects. Currently, for hosting we charge a little more than the cost of the “ specialist ” tariff . In exchange, we release the site owner from hemorrhoids for managing the account, we also take over the communication with the support and everyone is happy :). I am pretty sure that most of the existing studios work in approximately the same way.
Nevertheless, from time to time we think about how to make hosting better. And the point is not even that “Masterhost is not the same” - I still think that this is an adequate service for the money. Perhaps we just outgrew it. Or maybe from time to time problems arose with the work of more or less actively updated sites.
We fairly fairly honestly followed the recommendations of the support :), while optimizing scripts, finding errors, rewriting database queries, trying new caching methods ... all this, of course, yielded results but did not achieve tangible changes. Then they began to look for the reason: where are the “brakes"? As it turned out, the reason is floating: on some sites the file system slowed down, somewhere there were not enough processor resources, sometimes the database requests were processed too long.
All this is due to the fact that on a single virtual platform, as a rule, the host provider places many sites, and, of course, server resources are distributed between them. I understand that certain resources are reserved for each site and, ideally, problems should not arise in principle, in real life everything is not quite like that :(. It’s good if you are lucky and your corporate neighbors have become ordinary corporate projects with a couple of dozen hosts. Much worse if some popular resource or just a grief programmer-experimenter becomes your neighbor, then the difficulties about which I wrote a little higher are almost inevitable, and communication with support in such cases very quickly becomes completely undesign su- and unhelpful.
Food for Thought
We became interested in how many projects our hoster actually hosts on one physical server. Of course, the direct question, the engineers did not answer us. But as it turned out, you can get information from completely open sources (just go to ssh and type some correct commands), so I publish it here:
Honestly, I am not good at server technologies and I have no idea if this is a lot or a lot, can someone be able to enlighten the readers of this article? If you evaluate it very subjectively, it seems to me a little cramped for our projects).
Lyrical digression
In this place I will allow myself a small lyrical digression on the topic: how I see the ideal solution from our (studio) point of view.
It turned out there is such a tariff!
Since, as I already wrote, all our clients are hosted on the masterhost company’s resources, it’s natural to look for an alternative to virtual sites in the tariff list of our favorite company.
Almost immediately, our attention was attracted by the tariff: “ EuroDedicated Hosting ” (we must add that the appearance of this particular offer stimulated us to think again on this topic). Judge for yourself for 8 520 rubles a month we get at the complete disposal:
We were not happy for a long time, a careful study of the tariff plan revealed that these servers are located in the European data center in the Netherlands :( We were not too lazy and asked for a test apish and links to two binary files from the support (each can test it for himself):
The results of speed measurements from the glorious city of Rostov-on-Don, where the majority of our customers are located, were not pleased :(
What to do .., began to study a similar proposal but with placement in a Russian data center. Everything is much more expensive and simpler here:
This option seemed to us too expensive, but too modest configuration for the money.
For this reason, the question of improving the quality of hosting for our company’s customers has remained open :(. I’m almost sure that someone reading this blog has already passed this stage of development! Let's share our experience, when and how did you move to a new level hosting quality?
I think no one needs to be convinced that a good site is not only a beautiful functional design, a convenient management system, extremely complete statistics, transparency for search engines ... it is also a fast, reliable and high-quality hosting.
Looking ahead a bit, I’ll say. The most tempting solution is to buy and install your own server. The only thing that keeps us from this step is the doubt that we are able to independently provide a high level of security and reliability for the projects being placed.
Currently, we place all our clients on the virtual platforms of Masterhost. (Hereinafter, the name of a given company will quite often “pop up” ... This is not advertising, nor anti-advertising - it’s just a completely substantive question, but as usual, words cannot be erased.) So, we never hid from clients where we place projects. Currently, for hosting we charge a little more than the cost of the “ specialist ” tariff . In exchange, we release the site owner from hemorrhoids for managing the account, we also take over the communication with the support and everyone is happy :). I am pretty sure that most of the existing studios work in approximately the same way.
Nevertheless, from time to time we think about how to make hosting better. And the point is not even that “Masterhost is not the same” - I still think that this is an adequate service for the money. Perhaps we just outgrew it. Or maybe from time to time problems arose with the work of more or less actively updated sites.
We fairly fairly honestly followed the recommendations of the support :), while optimizing scripts, finding errors, rewriting database queries, trying new caching methods ... all this, of course, yielded results but did not achieve tangible changes. Then they began to look for the reason: where are the “brakes"? As it turned out, the reason is floating: on some sites the file system slowed down, somewhere there were not enough processor resources, sometimes the database requests were processed too long.
All this is due to the fact that on a single virtual platform, as a rule, the host provider places many sites, and, of course, server resources are distributed between them. I understand that certain resources are reserved for each site and, ideally, problems should not arise in principle, in real life everything is not quite like that :(. It’s good if you are lucky and your corporate neighbors have become ordinary corporate projects with a couple of dozen hosts. Much worse if some popular resource or just a grief programmer-experimenter becomes your neighbor, then the difficulties about which I wrote a little higher are almost inevitable, and communication with support in such cases very quickly becomes completely undesign su- and unhelpful.
Food for Thought
We became interested in how many projects our hoster actually hosts on one physical server. Of course, the direct question, the engineers did not answer us. But as it turned out, you can get information from completely open sources (just go to ssh and type some correct commands), so I publish it here:
Intel® Xeon® CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz
SAS 270 Gb / 67% Busy
Number of virtual sites - 441 (recall, each site can contain from 1 to fifteen sites, depending on the selected tariff)
Honestly, I am not good at server technologies and I have no idea if this is a lot or a lot, can someone be able to enlighten the readers of this article? If you evaluate it very subjectively, it seems to me a little cramped for our projects).
Lyrical digression
In this place I will allow myself a small lyrical digression on the topic: how I see the ideal solution from our (studio) point of view.
- As I said, we have a small studio, we do two or three projects a month. And of course, we cannot afford the staffing of one or two administrators who could quickly at any time of the day or night solve all possible difficulties and problems that could hypothetically arise with hardware or software. In this regard, we would very much like support to be provided by the hosting company.
- For the same reason, I would not want to have an “empty” server. Ideally, I would like to get all the installed turnkey software and a standard control panel (it is at least morally obsolete, but quite convenient to use).
- "Moving" should not lead to a significant increase in the cost of hosting services for our customers.
It turned out there is such a tariff!
Since, as I already wrote, all our clients are hosted on the masterhost company’s resources, it’s natural to look for an alternative to virtual sites in the tariff list of our favorite company.
Almost immediately, our attention was attracted by the tariff: “ EuroDedicated Hosting ” (we must add that the appearance of this particular offer stimulated us to think again on this topic). Judge for yourself for 8 520 rubles a month we get at the complete disposal:
- Dell R200 / Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3210, 2.13GHz, 2x4M Cache, 1066MHz FSB / 2x250 SATA / 2GB RAM
- Free installation
- 100 GB prepaid traffic;
- Professional hosting management environment identical to that installed on .masterhost hosting servers;
- Convenient and familiar to users of .masterhost services control panel for creating, modifying and managing sites;
- On one server it is possible to create up to 50 sites ;
- Round-the-clock technical support at the website level;
- Server administration and security control.
We were not happy for a long time, a careful study of the tariff plan revealed that these servers are located in the European data center in the Netherlands :( We were not too lazy and asked for a test apish and links to two binary files from the support (each can test it for himself):
test ip address: 90.156.228.254
test : csrnsvthtrfhlfvt@90.156.228.254/1M.bin
test : csrnsvthtrfhlfvt@90.156.228.254/10M.bin
The results of speed measurements from the glorious city of Rostov-on-Don, where the majority of our customers are located, were not pleased :(
What to do .., began to study a similar proposal but with placement in a Russian data center. Everything is much more expensive and simpler here:
- 15520 rub / month monthly fee
- 1U, Morally obsolete Pentium4 2.8GHz, 1Gb, 160Gb SATAHDD
- One-time installation payment - 9800 rub.
- 100 GB prepaid traffic;
This option seemed to us too expensive, but too modest configuration for the money.
For this reason, the question of improving the quality of hosting for our company’s customers has remained open :(. I’m almost sure that someone reading this blog has already passed this stage of development! Let's share our experience, when and how did you move to a new level hosting quality?