What should be hosting?
The eternal question of newbies, which often makes much more sense than we imagine. After all, it will be not only the choice of hosting provider, but also the choice of the service itself.
But at the beginning of the question itself, so that the discussion topic is more understandable:
We invite colleagues and well-versed webmasters to also take part in the discussion and express their opinions; we will be glad to receive comments with feedback and criticism.
My journey as a webmaster ended exactly when I decided to put my own web projects in the background and do what I do best - to provide people with quality hosting. And now, after almost 10 years of work in the hosting industry, having gone from a beginner with level 0 - who asked a more experienced classmate 11 years ago, what directory should the main page be downloaded to and what should it be called for the default interpreter, and less than a year later, he also sold a hosting account on a virtual server to an unregistered hosting provider - to a hosting provider whose subscribers generated more traffic than all of Belarus, I can say that the answer is not so ambiguous, complicated and can over time vary substantially.
And the reason is in the development of technologies, cheaper prices for services and their modification. My personal experience of choosing the right supplier is described in my article: “ua-hosting.company” or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate traffic more than the whole of Belarus . And if there is time - read, the article will already help to partially respond to today's question, not directly, but mediocre, acquire a basic understanding.
The truth is that if before the gap between the hosting service and the dedicated server was enormous, not only in terms of cost, but also in terms of the resources provided, now, given that the servers have become more powerful, even on a hosting service or virtual server costing in a few dollars, you can get as many resources as there were on dedicated servers of 2007-2009, which cost 50 times more expensive. And then the money was much more expensive. However, it is worth noting that applications / sites began to consume more resources at times, but not 50 times.
However, even in 2009, a website with a traffic of 25,000 hosts (unique visitors per day) could sometimes exist even on a hosting, even on a “free”, uCoz. By the way, there was a “funny” moment when a few years later the Google search engine filter crashed and uCoz schoolchildren websites — online movie theaters and other entertainment sites — were in the top. As a result of the failure, many schoolchildren who organized such sites were able to earn thousands of dollars a day from advertising. While webmasters with many years of experience in creating entertainment portals, with huge thousands of SEO investments and servers, have lost positions in search engines and suffered huge losses in the presence of huge accounts for streaming servers that they had to pay for centers. And this went on for a long period of time.
It all depends on the project. If this project is mostly static, with infrequent addition of new data, without applying a large number of filters and samples, for example, Habr type, it does not require enormous resources with attendance of 25,000 people per day or even more. If users watch video online and the broadcast will come from your server, you will probably need a dedicated server, and perhaps not even one. Also, as in the case of an online store, when a user searches for a product from a huge product database, which is updated frequently, information from warehouses is continuously pulled, actions related to adding data to the database, applying various filters and selections are performed - maybe you will need several servers just under the database, with setting up replication and building quite complex interaction models.
In any case, if you are only thinking of making a visited site and have never encountered this task, then, with a large share of probability, plans of 25,000 attendance can remain only plans.
You do not need to immediately buy / rent a mega-infrastructure for a project, on the other hand, sometimes the presence of the same dedicated server instead of VPS or hosting can provide additional convenience and will serve as an additional incentive to work, because somehow you will have to pay back the costs of at least iron .
Although, recently, the line between dedicated servers and VPS blurred, sometimes the latter are more convenient and more expedient than the former. As, for example, in the case of our virtual servers on dedicated drives:
ua-hosting.company / vds - a full-fledged analog of a dedicated server in the Netherlands,
which will not only be more convenient to the entry level of dedicated servers, but also much more productive. And most importantly, the solution can be much more stable, because iron is newer, and the node itself is accompanied around the clock by our team of experienced system administrators. And you do not need to pay a cent for this accompaniment.
But something I was distracted by advertising, I'm sorry :) I don’t hide it, why not promote the product if it really reached the dedicated server level of the dedicated server for many tasks, and in some cases even more powerful and productive, and most importantly, more convenient? This is also confirmed by our customers .
- if your project does not involve large loads, you do not need to tune server settings for it, and later with growth you can safely migrate the project to a more productive solution, simply by deploying it from the backup - high-quality hosting will be an ideal option to start with, as on hosting You can often get more resources than a VPS, free monitoring and no need to administer it;
- if your website hosted on the hosting, the hosting provider is going to transfer, for example, to nginx + php-fpm due to the very large number of requests and the need to optimize the load from it on the node, which will require action by the hosting provider, change the service to a VPS or even a dedicated server, because when you are going to transfer everything to something more than VPS, let's say a dedicated server at once - all these “fine” settings can be copied without the help of a hosting provider, and setting up the move and moving itself turn I truly hellish process;
- if you initially know that your project may initially require optimization of settings from the server side, you want to plan the necessary resources more clearly and fully monitor the load from your project, and also be able to migrate it in one click - it is better to place the project on a virtual server, for an image with a VPS can be deployed on a dedicated server fairly quickly along with optimized server settings, although at this point there may also be a lot of features;
- if you initially know that your project will consume a lot of CPU / RAM, then it is possible that virtual servers on dedicated drives will be an ideal solution, since due to the fact that there is a very limited number of users on such a node (no more than the number of drives) in a node, and if a service with RAID is the appropriate number of times less), everyone can get not only their guaranteed resource at peak, but sometimes much more, since the neighbors do not spend their entire CPU limit at the same time and the provider can allow consume free resource. Among other things, a dedicated drive will allow you to ensure the guaranteed performance of the storage and utilize the CPU fully, do not suddenly “crash” into the I / O storage. However, it is likely that you can rest against another parameter - traffic. So in cases where high CPU consumption leads to high traffic generation, a dedicated server may be preferable and a more cost effective solution.
- if you initially know that your project will consume a lot of traffic, it will be cheaper to place it on a dedicated server, because in addition to traffic, you will need to provide the storage capacity and storage needed for generating it, and on virtual, cloud servers and hosting sites - It can be extremely expensive.
Nevertheless, you can not listen to these tips and immediately get a dedicated server for the convenience of developing your project, if you are really sure that you will soon get an audience of 25,000 people, besides the need for a solid payment, compared to other options You will be encouraged to develop the project. Just do not forget about the main thing - maintenance. Never take a server without support without experience, because it will help you not to lose your data and make the project more resilient and efficient. Do not be lazy to consult your hosting provider about which server you need, what types of drives to choose the best and whether it is advisable to build a RAID. Do not save on "matches"!
Some will ask, but what about scalable infrastructures - clouds that allow you to increase the necessary resources over time? Could it be profitable?
Often not. Overpaying will have in most cases, all scalable infrastructures are beneficial only in cases where peak loads and you can buy a lot of necessary resources for a short time, and then also quickly sell, and also when it is all automated and paid for real consumption. But such projects are in fact very few.
And the dynamic resource itself is extremely dangerous in the end, as in cases where a script as a result of its work does not lead to an optimal use of resources or an attack occurs, both on your instance and from yours, and in the case of hacking as a result, it will be possible to get into several thousand dollars or even tens of thousands:
Also, bills were received for the use of related services, for example, a “funny” case occurred when a client paid over $ 150 for retrieving only 60 GB of data from Amazon Glacier:
Another client warned about a possible invoice for $ 22,000 in cases where it is necessary to extract the 3TB archive on the same day, since the pricing system is tricky and allows you to download only about 5 GB per day free of charge (for its tariff):
Do you need such a "glacier" with such risks - only you decide.
In that variant, when you expand in stages, this is only a convenience, due to the absence of the need for migration, which, according to the results, can be very costly. And it’s not so much about resources as about traffic. By renting a dedicated server, you can usually get 30-100 TB of traffic with the server, up to $ 100. Traffic on any cloud projects will be several times more expensive, and there may be more problems. It is obvious.
Moreover, renting scalable infrastructures for your projects is not a fact that they will receive the resources you need. Sometimes, there are problems with the performance of storage, inefficient CPU (are you sure about the quality of the processors used in the cloud, their fair distribution of these resources?). Ultimately, 10,000 IOPS in a scaled infrastructure will cost space money. While renting a dedicated server or even a virtual server with a dedicated drive, you can get tens of thousands of IOPS with the guarantee of using only you, while no one will bother you to add new servers to the cluster and scale. Only in the end can this solution be much more reliable, cheaper and have better connectivity.
Yes, you will overpay at the early stages, since you will need to rent a dedicated server immediately, even when you will not use these resources, but no one bothers to rent a VPS at the beginning and develop a clear migration plan. Also, the overpayment will be in the construction of a cluster solution in the future. However, working with a hosting provider that specializes in building such infrastructures - you still find yourself in the black. Since subsequently, having invested one-time in writing scripts and building your own solution, you do not need to migrate to another scalable infrastructure if something is not satisfactory in the current one and something becomes too expensive. You will never receive a bill for services that were hidden from your view by skilled cloud marketers.
In other words, it is more profitable to have control over your nodes yourself, decide for yourself at the expense of points of presence than rely on an IaaS provider who can change conditions to your taste and depend on their neighbors in this cloud and how the system is designed.
In addition, the clouds, if they fall, then fall for a long time, since large infrastructures sometimes lead to big problems and shortcomings, which sometimes cannot be resolved quickly.
It is for this reason that I urge to use solutions based on bare metal (physical dedicated servers) as much as possible, to spend less on cloud marketing, and if you take something in the cloud, then without the opportunity to get on an extra large surcharge.
As for the choice of the service provider itself, then you first need to decide on location. Not always accommodation in a location closer to the users can be optimal. Both legislatively and financially.
For example, if we are talking about a project of entertainment topics for a Russian-speaking audience, then it is better to take the server in the same Netherlands, and not Germany or the Russian Federation. After all, it is no secret that adult content in the Russian Federation is prohibited and you can easily get a block from Roskomnadzor, just for the fact that the site is located in Russia. In most regions of Germany, access to sites containing such content is possible with paid access, although there is a region in Germany where adult content is allowed in the public domain.
The most loyal country to content of this kind is the Netherlands. And believe me, 80% of users are interested in such content and they will try to upload it if the portal supports such an option. Although, if someone’s rights are violated, there may be a conflict with BREIN, an organization that fights against the spread of piracy in the Netherlands. But again, it all depends on how the resource will be positioned and how the DMCA work will be built.
And in terms of the cost of traffic and servers, the location is very profitable, and given the fact that there is a direct connection with the Russian Federation and Ukraine and you can get ping within 40-60 ms before MSK, the issue of approving the location is solved positively. Due to greater freedom and low price, adequate legislation, the Netherlands is one of the favorable points of Europe, where a lot of Internet projects are concentrated and we have chosen for ourselves and our clients it as the main one: “The advantages of location in the Netherlands, EvoSwitch Data Center”.
According to the supplier is much more difficult to determine. Providers promote their services by a variety of methods, often black. The latter can include “true” reviews on resources left by customers without clear identification, or clones, and therefore reviews may not always be objective.
The most effective verification method is to register in the system, open a request in those. department and sales department and see what time it takes to respond to requests, what kind of answers do you provide. Feel free to look silly when asking questions. Sometimes a seemingly stupid question may actually not be pretty dumb, or, on the contrary, show the stupidity of a service provider. If you are just starting your journey in web construction - feel free to read Google to ask not just a question, but a question that will show the degree of literacy and professionalism of your chosen service provider in various aspects.
Good luck with your projects, reliable hosting providers and at least 99.95% uptime! In the comments we will be glad to hear your opinions regarding the answer to the question posed at the beginning.
But at the beginning of the question itself, so that the discussion topic is more understandable:
I am going to raise the site of entertainment topics, in the future which may have a large number of traffic, ddos ​​and the like.
')
Is it a pleasure to maintain such sites? What are the sites with traffic 25-50k per day? What to choose?
We invite colleagues and well-versed webmasters to also take part in the discussion and express their opinions; we will be glad to receive comments with feedback and criticism.
My journey as a webmaster ended exactly when I decided to put my own web projects in the background and do what I do best - to provide people with quality hosting. And now, after almost 10 years of work in the hosting industry, having gone from a beginner with level 0 - who asked a more experienced classmate 11 years ago, what directory should the main page be downloaded to and what should it be called for the default interpreter, and less than a year later, he also sold a hosting account on a virtual server to an unregistered hosting provider - to a hosting provider whose subscribers generated more traffic than all of Belarus, I can say that the answer is not so ambiguous, complicated and can over time vary substantially.
And the reason is in the development of technologies, cheaper prices for services and their modification. My personal experience of choosing the right supplier is described in my article: “ua-hosting.company” or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate traffic more than the whole of Belarus . And if there is time - read, the article will already help to partially respond to today's question, not directly, but mediocre, acquire a basic understanding.
The truth is that if before the gap between the hosting service and the dedicated server was enormous, not only in terms of cost, but also in terms of the resources provided, now, given that the servers have become more powerful, even on a hosting service or virtual server costing in a few dollars, you can get as many resources as there were on dedicated servers of 2007-2009, which cost 50 times more expensive. And then the money was much more expensive. However, it is worth noting that applications / sites began to consume more resources at times, but not 50 times.
However, even in 2009, a website with a traffic of 25,000 hosts (unique visitors per day) could sometimes exist even on a hosting, even on a “free”, uCoz. By the way, there was a “funny” moment when a few years later the Google search engine filter crashed and uCoz schoolchildren websites — online movie theaters and other entertainment sites — were in the top. As a result of the failure, many schoolchildren who organized such sites were able to earn thousands of dollars a day from advertising. While webmasters with many years of experience in creating entertainment portals, with huge thousands of SEO investments and servers, have lost positions in search engines and suffered huge losses in the presence of huge accounts for streaming servers that they had to pay for centers. And this went on for a long period of time.
But back to the question. What is the best solution for a project with an attendance of 25,000 people per day?
It all depends on the project. If this project is mostly static, with infrequent addition of new data, without applying a large number of filters and samples, for example, Habr type, it does not require enormous resources with attendance of 25,000 people per day or even more. If users watch video online and the broadcast will come from your server, you will probably need a dedicated server, and perhaps not even one. Also, as in the case of an online store, when a user searches for a product from a huge product database, which is updated frequently, information from warehouses is continuously pulled, actions related to adding data to the database, applying various filters and selections are performed - maybe you will need several servers just under the database, with setting up replication and building quite complex interaction models.
In any case, if you are only thinking of making a visited site and have never encountered this task, then, with a large share of probability, plans of 25,000 attendance can remain only plans.
You do not need to immediately buy / rent a mega-infrastructure for a project, on the other hand, sometimes the presence of the same dedicated server instead of VPS or hosting can provide additional convenience and will serve as an additional incentive to work, because somehow you will have to pay back the costs of at least iron .
Although, recently, the line between dedicated servers and VPS blurred, sometimes the latter are more convenient and more expedient than the former. As, for example, in the case of our virtual servers on dedicated drives:
ua-hosting.company / vds - a full-fledged analog of a dedicated server in the Netherlands,
which will not only be more convenient to the entry level of dedicated servers, but also much more productive. And most importantly, the solution can be much more stable, because iron is newer, and the node itself is accompanied around the clock by our team of experienced system administrators. And you do not need to pay a cent for this accompaniment.
But something I was distracted by advertising, I'm sorry :) I don’t hide it, why not promote the product if it really reached the dedicated server level of the dedicated server for many tasks, and in some cases even more powerful and productive, and most importantly, more convenient? This is also confirmed by our customers .
So which service to choose in the general case?
- if your project does not involve large loads, you do not need to tune server settings for it, and later with growth you can safely migrate the project to a more productive solution, simply by deploying it from the backup - high-quality hosting will be an ideal option to start with, as on hosting You can often get more resources than a VPS, free monitoring and no need to administer it;
- if your website hosted on the hosting, the hosting provider is going to transfer, for example, to nginx + php-fpm due to the very large number of requests and the need to optimize the load from it on the node, which will require action by the hosting provider, change the service to a VPS or even a dedicated server, because when you are going to transfer everything to something more than VPS, let's say a dedicated server at once - all these “fine” settings can be copied without the help of a hosting provider, and setting up the move and moving itself turn I truly hellish process;
- if you initially know that your project may initially require optimization of settings from the server side, you want to plan the necessary resources more clearly and fully monitor the load from your project, and also be able to migrate it in one click - it is better to place the project on a virtual server, for an image with a VPS can be deployed on a dedicated server fairly quickly along with optimized server settings, although at this point there may also be a lot of features;
- if you initially know that your project will consume a lot of CPU / RAM, then it is possible that virtual servers on dedicated drives will be an ideal solution, since due to the fact that there is a very limited number of users on such a node (no more than the number of drives) in a node, and if a service with RAID is the appropriate number of times less), everyone can get not only their guaranteed resource at peak, but sometimes much more, since the neighbors do not spend their entire CPU limit at the same time and the provider can allow consume free resource. Among other things, a dedicated drive will allow you to ensure the guaranteed performance of the storage and utilize the CPU fully, do not suddenly “crash” into the I / O storage. However, it is likely that you can rest against another parameter - traffic. So in cases where high CPU consumption leads to high traffic generation, a dedicated server may be preferable and a more cost effective solution.
- if you initially know that your project will consume a lot of traffic, it will be cheaper to place it on a dedicated server, because in addition to traffic, you will need to provide the storage capacity and storage needed for generating it, and on virtual, cloud servers and hosting sites - It can be extremely expensive.
Nevertheless, you can not listen to these tips and immediately get a dedicated server for the convenience of developing your project, if you are really sure that you will soon get an audience of 25,000 people, besides the need for a solid payment, compared to other options You will be encouraged to develop the project. Just do not forget about the main thing - maintenance. Never take a server without support without experience, because it will help you not to lose your data and make the project more resilient and efficient. Do not be lazy to consult your hosting provider about which server you need, what types of drives to choose the best and whether it is advisable to build a RAID. Do not save on "matches"!
Why not clouds? Or why should clouds be chosen with care?
Some will ask, but what about scalable infrastructures - clouds that allow you to increase the necessary resources over time? Could it be profitable?
Often not. Overpaying will have in most cases, all scalable infrastructures are beneficial only in cases where peak loads and you can buy a lot of necessary resources for a short time, and then also quickly sell, and also when it is all automated and paid for real consumption. But such projects are in fact very few.
And the dynamic resource itself is extremely dangerous in the end, as in cases where a script as a result of its work does not lead to an optimal use of resources or an attack occurs, both on your instance and from yours, and in the case of hacking as a result, it will be possible to get into several thousand dollars or even tens of thousands:
NO !, i just got a $ 1000 bill due: “Thanks for following up. Your instance appears to have been compromised. It was implicated in a large scale Distributed Denial of Service attack. It’s a real challenge. ”
Also, bills were received for the use of related services, for example, a “funny” case occurred when a client paid over $ 150 for retrieving only 60 GB of data from Amazon Glacier:
I ended up paying $ 150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier
Another client warned about a possible invoice for $ 22,000 in cases where it is necessary to extract the 3TB archive on the same day, since the pricing system is tricky and allows you to download only about 5 GB per day free of charge (for its tariff):
The retrieval fee for 3TB can be as high as $ 22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ.
After uploading 3TB (3 * 2 ^ 40 bytes) as a single archive, your retrieval allowance would be 153.6 GB / mo (3TB * 5%), or 5.12 GB / day (3TB * 5% / 30). It was 3072 GB - 5.12 GB = 3066.88 GB.
Thus, your retrieval fee would be 3066.88 * 720 * .01 = $ 22081.535 (719x your monthly storage fee).
That would be a wake-up call for someone just doing some testing.
Do you need such a "glacier" with such risks - only you decide.
In that variant, when you expand in stages, this is only a convenience, due to the absence of the need for migration, which, according to the results, can be very costly. And it’s not so much about resources as about traffic. By renting a dedicated server, you can usually get 30-100 TB of traffic with the server, up to $ 100. Traffic on any cloud projects will be several times more expensive, and there may be more problems. It is obvious.
Moreover, renting scalable infrastructures for your projects is not a fact that they will receive the resources you need. Sometimes, there are problems with the performance of storage, inefficient CPU (are you sure about the quality of the processors used in the cloud, their fair distribution of these resources?). Ultimately, 10,000 IOPS in a scaled infrastructure will cost space money. While renting a dedicated server or even a virtual server with a dedicated drive, you can get tens of thousands of IOPS with the guarantee of using only you, while no one will bother you to add new servers to the cluster and scale. Only in the end can this solution be much more reliable, cheaper and have better connectivity.
Yes, you will overpay at the early stages, since you will need to rent a dedicated server immediately, even when you will not use these resources, but no one bothers to rent a VPS at the beginning and develop a clear migration plan. Also, the overpayment will be in the construction of a cluster solution in the future. However, working with a hosting provider that specializes in building such infrastructures - you still find yourself in the black. Since subsequently, having invested one-time in writing scripts and building your own solution, you do not need to migrate to another scalable infrastructure if something is not satisfactory in the current one and something becomes too expensive. You will never receive a bill for services that were hidden from your view by skilled cloud marketers.
In other words, it is more profitable to have control over your nodes yourself, decide for yourself at the expense of points of presence than rely on an IaaS provider who can change conditions to your taste and depend on their neighbors in this cloud and how the system is designed.
In addition, the clouds, if they fall, then fall for a long time, since large infrastructures sometimes lead to big problems and shortcomings, which sometimes cannot be resolved quickly.
It is for this reason that I urge to use solutions based on bare metal (physical dedicated servers) as much as possible, to spend less on cloud marketing, and if you take something in the cloud, then without the opportunity to get on an extra large surcharge.
Choosing a service provider.
As for the choice of the service provider itself, then you first need to decide on location. Not always accommodation in a location closer to the users can be optimal. Both legislatively and financially.
For example, if we are talking about a project of entertainment topics for a Russian-speaking audience, then it is better to take the server in the same Netherlands, and not Germany or the Russian Federation. After all, it is no secret that adult content in the Russian Federation is prohibited and you can easily get a block from Roskomnadzor, just for the fact that the site is located in Russia. In most regions of Germany, access to sites containing such content is possible with paid access, although there is a region in Germany where adult content is allowed in the public domain.
The most loyal country to content of this kind is the Netherlands. And believe me, 80% of users are interested in such content and they will try to upload it if the portal supports such an option. Although, if someone’s rights are violated, there may be a conflict with BREIN, an organization that fights against the spread of piracy in the Netherlands. But again, it all depends on how the resource will be positioned and how the DMCA work will be built.
And in terms of the cost of traffic and servers, the location is very profitable, and given the fact that there is a direct connection with the Russian Federation and Ukraine and you can get ping within 40-60 ms before MSK, the issue of approving the location is solved positively. Due to greater freedom and low price, adequate legislation, the Netherlands is one of the favorable points of Europe, where a lot of Internet projects are concentrated and we have chosen for ourselves and our clients it as the main one: “The advantages of location in the Netherlands, EvoSwitch Data Center”.
According to the supplier is much more difficult to determine. Providers promote their services by a variety of methods, often black. The latter can include “true” reviews on resources left by customers without clear identification, or clones, and therefore reviews may not always be objective.
The most effective verification method is to register in the system, open a request in those. department and sales department and see what time it takes to respond to requests, what kind of answers do you provide. Feel free to look silly when asking questions. Sometimes a seemingly stupid question may actually not be pretty dumb, or, on the contrary, show the stupidity of a service provider. If you are just starting your journey in web construction - feel free to read Google to ask not just a question, but a question that will show the degree of literacy and professionalism of your chosen service provider in various aspects.
Good luck with your projects, reliable hosting providers and at least 99.95% uptime! In the comments we will be glad to hear your opinions regarding the answer to the question posed at the beginning.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319264/
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