Let'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 quite seriously investigated the problem, so under the habrakat there are quite a few letters :), but unfortunately, we didn’t find “our solution”, so I decided to write to this blog.
I think no one needs to be convinced that a good website is not only a beautiful functional design, convenient management system, extremely complete statistics, transparency for search engines ... it is also a fast, reliable and high-quality hosting.
Looking ahead to say a little. The most tempting decision seems to be buying and installing your own server. The only thing that keeps us from this step is the doubts that we are able to independently ensure a high level of safety and reliability for the projects being placed.
')
Currently, we place all our clients on the virtual platforms of the company Masterhost. (Here and hereinafter, quite often the name of this company will “pop up” ... This is not advertising or anti-advertising - it's just a question that is quite substantive, but from the song, as usual, words cannot be thrown out.) So, we never hide from customers where we place the projects. Currently, we take a bit more than the cost of the " specialist " tariff for hosting. In exchange, we release the site owner from hemorrhoids in account management, we also take on communication with the support and everyone is happy :). I am almost sure that most of the existing studios work according to the same scheme.
Nevertheless, from time to time we think about how to make hosting better. And the matter is not even that “Masterhost is not the same anymore” - I still think: that this is an adequate service for your money. Perhaps we just outgrew it. Or maybe the problems that arose from time to time with the work of more or less actively updated sites played their role.
We fairly and honestly followed the recommendations of the support :), working on optimizing scripts, searching for errors, rewriting requests to the database, trying new caching methods ... all this, of course, gave its results, but no tangible changes were achieved. Then they began to look for the reason: where is the “brake” itself? As it turned out, the reason is floating: on some sites, the file system was slowing down, where there was not enough processor resources, and sometimes requests to the database were processed for too long.
All this is due to the fact that on the same virtual platform, as a rule, the hosting provider hosts 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 this :(. Well, if you're lucky, ordinary corporate projects with attendance of a couple of dozen hosts have become your neighbors. Much worse if any popular resource becomes your neighbor or just an experimenter-programmer's grief, then the difficulties about which I wrote a little higher are almost inevitable, and communication with support in such cases very quickly becomes completely un-constructive. ktivny and useless.
Information for consideration
We wondered how many projects actually hosted on one physical server, our hoster. Of course, a direct question, the engineers did not answer us. But as it turned out, you can get information from completely open sources (just log in via ssh and type some correct commands), so I publish it here:
Honestly, I am not strong in server technologies and I have no idea a little or a lot, maybe someone will be able to enlighten from reading this article? If we evaluate it very subjectively, it seems to me that our projects are a bit cramped).
Lyrical digression
In this place I will allow myself a small lyrical digression on the topic: how I see the perfect solution from our (studio) point of view.
It turned out there is such a tariff!
Since, as I already wrote, all our clients are placed on the masterhost company resources, it is natural to look for an alternative to the virtual platforms in the list of tariffs of the favorite company.
Almost immediately, our attention was attracted by the tariff: “ EuroDedicated Hosting ” (it should be added that the appearance of this particular proposal stimulated us to think again on this topic). Judge for 8 520 rubles a month, we get at full disposal:
We were not happy for long, a careful study of the tariff plan found that these servers were located in a European data center in the Netherlands: (We were not too lazy and asked for a test apishnik and links to two binary files (everyone can test it himself):
The results of speed measurements from the glorious city of Rostov-on-Don, where more than half of our clients are located, did not make happy :(
What to do .., began to study a similar offer but with accommodation in the Russian data center. Here everything is much more expensive and simpler:
This option seemed to us too expensive, but too modest configuration for the money.
For this reason, the issue of improving the quality of hosting for our company's clients has remained open :(. I am pretty sure that someone reading this blog has already passed this stage of development! Let's share experience when and how you made the transition to a new level quality hosting?
I think no one needs to be convinced that a good website is not only a beautiful functional design, convenient management system, extremely complete statistics, transparency for search engines ... it is also a fast, reliable and high-quality hosting.
Looking ahead to say a little. The most tempting decision seems to be buying and installing your own server. The only thing that keeps us from this step is the doubts that we are able to independently ensure a high level of safety and reliability for the projects being placed.
')
Currently, we place all our clients on the virtual platforms of the company Masterhost. (Here and hereinafter, quite often the name of this company will “pop up” ... This is not advertising or anti-advertising - it's just a question that is quite substantive, but from the song, as usual, words cannot be thrown out.) So, we never hide from customers where we place the projects. Currently, we take a bit more than the cost of the " specialist " tariff for hosting. In exchange, we release the site owner from hemorrhoids in account management, we also take on communication with the support and everyone is happy :). I am almost sure that most of the existing studios work according to the same scheme.
Nevertheless, from time to time we think about how to make hosting better. And the matter is not even that “Masterhost is not the same anymore” - I still think: that this is an adequate service for your money. Perhaps we just outgrew it. Or maybe the problems that arose from time to time with the work of more or less actively updated sites played their role.
We fairly and honestly followed the recommendations of the support :), working on optimizing scripts, searching for errors, rewriting requests to the database, trying new caching methods ... all this, of course, gave its results, but no tangible changes were achieved. Then they began to look for the reason: where is the “brake” itself? As it turned out, the reason is floating: on some sites, the file system was slowing down, where there was not enough processor resources, and sometimes requests to the database were processed for too long.
All this is due to the fact that on the same virtual platform, as a rule, the hosting provider hosts 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 this :(. Well, if you're lucky, ordinary corporate projects with attendance of a couple of dozen hosts have become your neighbors. Much worse if any popular resource becomes your neighbor or just an experimenter-programmer's grief, then the difficulties about which I wrote a little higher are almost inevitable, and communication with support in such cases very quickly becomes completely un-constructive. ktivny and useless.
Information for consideration
We wondered how many projects actually hosted on one physical server, our hoster. Of course, a direct question, the engineers did not answer us. But as it turned out, you can get information from completely open sources (just log in via ssh and type some correct commands), so I publish it here:
Intel® Xeon® CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz
SAS 270 Gb / 67% Busy
The number of virtual sites - 441 (remember, each site can contain from 1 to fifteen sites, depending on the selected tariff)
Honestly, I am not strong in server technologies and I have no idea a little or a lot, maybe someone will be able to enlighten from reading this article? If we evaluate it very subjectively, it seems to me that our projects are a bit cramped).
Lyrical digression
In this place I will allow myself a small lyrical digression on the topic: how I see the perfect solution from our (studio) point of view.
- As I said, we have a small studio, we do two or three projects per month. And of course, we cannot afford to keep one or two administrators on staff who could promptly, at any time of the day or night, solve all possible difficulties and problems that may hypothetically arise with hardware or software. In this regard, we would very much like to see support 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 installed turnkey software and a standard control panel (although it is morally outdated, but it is quite convenient to use).
- "Relocation" should not lead to a strong increase in the cost of hosting services for our clients.
It turned out there is such a tariff!
Since, as I already wrote, all our clients are placed on the masterhost company resources, it is natural to look for an alternative to the virtual platforms in the list of tariffs of the favorite company.
Almost immediately, our attention was attracted by the tariff: “ EuroDedicated Hosting ” (it should be added that the appearance of this particular proposal stimulated us to think again on this topic). Judge for 8 520 rubles a month, we get at full disposal:
- Dell R200 / Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3210, 2.13GHz, 2x4M Cache, 1066MHz FSB / 2x250 SATA / 2GB RAM
- Installation free
- 100 GB prepaid traffic volume;
- Professional hosting management environment, identical to the one installed on hosting servers .masterhost;
- 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 ;
- 24/7 technical support at the website level;
- Server administration and security control.
We were not happy for long, a careful study of the tariff plan found that these servers were located in a European data center in the Netherlands: (We were not too lazy and asked for a test apishnik and links to two binary files (everyone can test it 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 more than half of our clients are located, did not make happy :(
What to do .., began to study a similar offer but with accommodation in the Russian data center. Here everything is much more expensive and simpler:
- 15520 rub. / Month subscription fee
- 1U, Morally obsolete Pentium4 2.8GHz, 1Gb, 160Gb SATAHDD
- Installation one-time payment - 9800 rub.
- 100 GB prepaid traffic volume;
This option seemed to us too expensive, but too modest configuration for the money.
For this reason, the issue of improving the quality of hosting for our company's clients has remained open :(. I am pretty sure that someone reading this blog has already passed this stage of development! Let's share experience when and how you made the transition to a new level quality hosting?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/54556/
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