[Chambana-info] Re: [Acorn-Telecentre.org] Web hosting requirements

[Steven Mansour]

Doh,

well there's nothing bad on there. :)

s.

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 17:13 -0500, dan blah wrote:
> i think you ment to send this to aam-staff or maybe chambana-info but
> probably not aam-tc (which has idrc folks on it)... :)
> Steven Mansour wrote:
> > Hey everyone,
> >
> > I'd mentioned to a few of you that I was looking into the idea of moving
> > my personal and client sites over to Chambana.net. I wanted to make a
> > list of my hosting requirements so that we can see if such a move would
> > make sense, or if I need to bite the bullet and get a dedicated server
> > at a commercial host. There are also other partners (Prometheus Radio,
> > Allied Media Conference, etc) who would be interested in this.
> >
> > I currently run about 22 sites, 14 of which are fairly active, one of
> > which occasionally experiences bursts of very heavy traffic, and another
> > which puts a considerable strain on MySQL (think telecentre.org-size DB,
> > but cleaner ;) ). Almost all are either NGO / charity stuff, government
> > stuff, personal stuff, friend stuff and pro-bono stuff, and a few are
> > quite high-profile. 
> >
> > Of these, about 75% are Drupal, and the rest are a mix of Joomla,
> > Wordpress, and Mediawiki. I know we're already on PHP5, so those all
> > should be fine. I've also been doing some Ruby-on-Rails stuff, and I
> > don't know how difficult it would be to get that working if it's not
> > already. 
> >
> >
> >   
> ruby's cool... your stuff will work just fine.
> > I don't know the history of Chambana.net all that well and I don't know
> > what the plans are (if any) to extend the hosting side of things, but
> > right now, I have three directions I'm thinking to go in for my own
> > hosting:
> >
> >      1. Buy a 1U server myself and colo it at Chambana.net, which we
> >         could also use for other small projects if it's not overloaded.
> >   
> we dont have the bandwidth or power just yet to open the doors to
> colocation requests...
> >      2. Rent out an account on the current Chambana.net hosting setup.
> >         
> >   
> yeah this can be done...
> >      3. Just get a dedicated server at some reputable commercial host,
> >         like JaguarPC or Liquidweb.
> >
> >   
> bleh...
> > My initial concerns had to do with stability and uptime, but seeing as
> > how we're confident enough to host telecentre.org here, I'm feeling
> > pretty good about Chambana.net's ability to host my own projects. Which
> > leaves me with only two concerns: bandwidth, traffic spikes, and CPU /
> > Mem usage. I have no idea what my hardware requirements are based on how
> > busy my sites are, but here are a few questions:
> >
> >
> >      1. Traffic spikes: How well would Chambana.net deal with the 'Digg
> >         effect'? An article I wrote hit over 2000 diggs in a few hours a
> >         couple weeks ago, and within minutes it brought my site down.
> >         Then my other sites. Then all the other people's sites on the
> >         same account. I don't want to cause heavy disruptions on the
> >         Chambana.net infrastructure, so I'm wondering if there's a
> >         throttle mechanism or something to help mitigate the dangers of
> >         a DDOS-type traffic surge. If I colo my own server at
> >         Chambana.net, I imagine this would be a bit less of an issue.
> >         
> >   
> well we are likely to only get 3mbps symmetric initially at our data
> center at which point a spike would likely hurt everyone in the data
> center/building.
> >      2. Bandwidth: I know Chambana.net provides 'low-cost' hosting, and
> >         I have bandwidth / hardware requirements that probably don't
> >         fall into the 'low-cost' bracket. Is there a defined policy on
> >         bandwidth usage? Exactly how much bandwidth does Chambana.net
> >         currently have to spare? How much is a reasonable amount, say
> >         per month?
> >         
> >   
> defined policy... no.  bandwidth to spare... none (at least at our
> urbana facility). 
> >      3. Virtualization: in the case of shared hosting, is there any sort
> >         of Xen / Virtuozzo virtualization that we're using, or is every
> >         account side by side?
> >         
> >   
> we haven't set this up yet but i really really want to...
> >      4. Control panels, web mail, and other niceties: Is any of this
> >         planned or available if Chambana.Net is going to upshift into
> >         higher-end hosting? An automated script for new accounts to
> >         allow for quick deployment of the most used tools (webmail,
> >         maybe a control panel, phpmyadmin, etc) and account control
> >         would be nice. Going above and beyond would be pre-configured
> >         scripts (like that reverse-rsync-over-ssh thing I mentioned to
> >         you, Josh - but now I think I'm pushing my luck a little) ;).
> >      
> >   
> heh... web mail is in the works and will definetly be available soon. 
> phpmyadmin is already availabe and will continue to be.  control panels,
> imo, are mostly worthless and are very exploitable.
> 
> also, we dont want to be a higher-end hosting project.  thats not to say
> we wont offer great servers in bandwidth, server reliability, etc... but
> i dont feel we ought to be all that accessible to users who dont have at
> least a tinsy bit of admin experience.
> 
> hardly any two users of chambana.net are the same in that they all use
> mail, web, database, drupal, etc.  this is not to say that a well
> thought out account script wouldn't be useful... i just dont want to
> make it.
> > So, I was just thinking out loud here... 
> >
> > What direction is Chambana.net moving in?
> >
> > s.
> >
> >   
> my suggestion would be to wait for our new colocation server that should
> be up w/in the next couple weeks.  if the service and bw seem good then
> we can set you up on there for whatever you can donate a month.  this
> server will end up holding tc as well as handle redundancy and offsite
> backups of our local services.  it will be on a 100mbit port that will
> be for the most part unmetered.  i would say as long as you are not
> using a max on average of 2GB a day (~194kb sustained) we will be fine.
> 
> what specifics can you get me on your setup now?
> daily out going throughput
> daily in coming throughput
> number or system users
> number of email accounts
> current disk usage
> whats your db server doing:
> -transfer / hr
> -connections / hr
> 
>