I am contemplating moving hosts. Someone has recommended vps.net. They suggest I also pay for litespeed.
Howevere I have never heard of it, I dont know what it does and I would like to know if it will benefit my site which is made up of wordpress and smf.
Litespeed (http://www.litespeedtech.com/) is a commercial web server software that claims Apache compatibility. It is supposed to be much faster and handle much higher load than standard Apache.
I don't personally know of anyone using it. Most people looking for a really quick server are using lighttpd or nginx.
I don't believe the extra speed of Litespeed merits the cost. The only real benefit to it is the Apache compatibility, but that's mostly if you're not willing to learn using a new webserver.
Quote from: Ensiferous on February 08, 2010, 10:41:44 PM
The only real benefit to it is the Apache compatibility, but that's mostly if you're not willing to learn using a new webserver.
Exactly. It's great if you are a company and have a huge investment in an application that depends on the quirks of Apache HTTPd and can justify the cost of the server being less than code changes in your web app.
In the case of SMF and most general-purpose web applications, the underlying server won't matter so using nginx or lighttpd will work just as well.
A properly tuned Apache HTTPd will handle quite a bit of load, however. It really comes down to what you are prepared to do, what you know, and if the investment in doing these things will pay off.
None of that matters if your VPS has limited RAM, and an undersized CPU.
Quote from: stfox100 on February 09, 2010, 01:48:55 AM
None of that matters if your VPS has limited RAM, and an undersized CPU.
True, but a lot of that comes down to tuning and using the right software. I can run SMF in a 64 MB machine. It won't be blazing fast, but I'll still get reasonable performance for a small forum. Give me 128 MB and I'll double the speed. Give me 256 MB with 1 GHz of CPU, and I can make a 100K post forum quick with 100 users online. You have to know your software though.
You're right, but how many users would you guess, know how to tune their landing page? Heck, I know how to but don't even bother. People want their servers to smoke,.... no matter what software is on it.
Quote from: stfox100 on February 09, 2010, 07:55:46 PM
You're right, but how many users would you guess, know how to tune their landing page? Heck, I know how to but don't even bother. People want their servers to smoke,.... no matter what software is on it.
Agreed.
My site is a mix of wordpress, coppermine and smf. The reason I asked about Litespeed is because I was reading a post by a wordpress guru who says lightspeed really speeds things up for him. I was wondering if it would be useful for my site, but by the sounds of it there isnt much to be gained.
This is the post I was reading by the way.
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-hosting/
p.s Mark, could you give me some tips on how to make my site a lot faster. Im running on a 0.5 gig cloud with UKfast.
A little more information on your server specs would help.
You can't compare yourself to the articles publisher, Yoast, who is using 7 nodes, (server images) to meet their demands for a very large audience across a wide geographical area,(worldwide).
Now it's a bit clearer though. Coppermine will use a lot more resources than Wordpress if you have many files.
But, with everything being served off a cloud node, that shouldn't matter much. Once one file is pulled from a node, it should be ready to be served nearly instantly to any user.
So,....you must have a bottleneck somewhere. Which leads me back to server specs, site specs, (how large is your site?), and then to page optimization. Although if Mark would like to lay out some tips, it could never hurt and actually show some significant improvement.
Hi There,
My site runs well most of the time. Infact when it runs well its as fast as lightening. But every now and again I get periods of down time (They are less frequent than they were). My hosts says I am getting a bottle neck, my account manager tries to sell me more resources. I get really stressed when it happens. The last episode of downtime was on Monday when the site ran slow from 8am to 5pm UK time (To a point of timing out). What I found strange at this time was that everytime the host rebooted the server my forum stats showed about 60 users online at once and about 60 guests too. In the 5 years I have run the forum I have never had this many people on at once and I believe strongly that that amount of people wernt on the site. I think it was showing a backlog of people from all of the morning.
This is an excerpt from the last explanation I got
QuoteThe issue with the server not responding was due to the the number of apache processes
started but not closing soon after no longer needed (fixed through tweaking the
configuration), combined with the amount of memory required by the web application which
may not be freed up when no longer needed (this would be have to be investigated within
the code).
The email issue was discovered during while checking the memory usage of the server
and was not related to the web server issues. This was due to a misconfigured scheduled
maintenence job and this has been fixed.
The main issue is resouce management. We don't however have any information to the
resources available on your previous server.
Sorry for this being a long winded post. My Cloud hosting is 512 Ram on a 2.27ghz CPU for which I pay about £950 per year. On there I run plesk but only have 2 domains set up. On there I run 2 domains + 1 sub domain
http://www.whitbyseaanglers.co.uk
http://holderness-coast-fishing.co.uk/
http://www.wcsa.whitbyseaanglers.co.uk/
On the first domain is 1 smf forum 121619 Posts in 13580 Topics by 2366 Members (Average online about 20 at any time. Sometimes there is about 60 online but this is on busy evenings and is a rare occurence). Also on that domain is 1 coppermine gallery (Not very busy), several wordpress installations + some html pages
On 2nd domain is 1 wordpress installation and 1 forum which is far less busy than the first domain 18731 Posts in 3342 Topics by 854 Members.
On the subdomain is 1 relatively quiet wordpress installation.
I am unable to tell you how busy the site is. I am not sure how to measure this.
I would follow the recommendations in the Twenty-four things you can do to make SMF go faster (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=293441.0) thread first.
If you are running into a resource issue, I would recommend a change to a modern webserver such as Nginx or Lighttpd. Apache has a poor way of handling additional request volume under load (its memory usage explodes). It does take some knowledge to setup though. And I'm not sure how well wordpress works behind Nginx (never tried personally).
Quote from: «Mark» on February 10, 2010, 03:49:25 PM
And I'm not sure how well wordpress works behind Nginx (never tried personally).
Doing a quick search, many people are using this combination effectively. There appears to be a few issues with redirects, but there are solutions to convert the rewrites to work with nginx.
"have a bottleneck" isn't going to do you much good. You need to know what the bottleneck is, CPU, memory? Where does it occur, PHP, database, file system?
It sounds like you pay a lot of money for not very much to be honest.
Litespeed is only going to help with static files,...mostly. But you're on a cloud server, so it doesn't matter. You need more than 512 memory for spikes. Most hosts have this pre-configured that way already, but maybe not yours. If you optimize your site as Mark pointed to, you may be able to get memory use down enough. My opinion anyway, from my experience. :)
Quote from: Ensiferous on February 10, 2010, 04:58:09 PM
It sounds like you pay a lot of money for not very much to be honest.
Could you tell me where I can get more value. I need a UK server and good support.
Sorry, not familiar with the UK hosting market. Could be that it's just more expensive than other places.
Hosting in the UK does seem to be higher in cost than other locations, at least from what I've heard from multiple people in the past.
A good option is to find a highly-connected US host. If you get a host with a good uplink, the difference in speed between a local and US server location will be very small. New York-located hosts are ideal in that case as that is one of the major peering points between the two continents.
Or get a cheap host in the Netherlands to avoid the 100 ms round trip across the pond. :)
Actually, although NY and New Jersey are full of data centers, DC has more updated and newer data centers with better connections. Such as Equinix in Northern Virginia, just outside of DC.
Quote from: stfox100 on February 11, 2010, 12:16:08 PM
Actually, although NY and New Jersey are full of data centers, DC has more updated and newer data centers with better connections. Such as Equinix in Northern Virginia, just outside of DC.
Thanks for the information. I'm a bit behind on the East Coast data centers (I live in California).
Quote from: stfox100 on February 11, 2010, 12:16:08 PM
Such as Equinix in Northern Virginia, just outside of DC.
Equinix is also easily one of the most expensive datacentres, I have rackspace in their Sunnyvale datacentre and it's the most expensive one I've seen so far.
Been in there? Awesome set up they have, ( at least in Va.), Regardless of data center costs, it's still up to server providers to determine their rates to consumers.
I am now searching for shared web hosting and found already quite many using LiteSpeed. For example MDDHosting (.com) , hawkhost , ...
or this member here has litespeed hosting in signature
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=profile;u=132481
I think I will try one of them.
I can tell you straight off the bat, I can host you using Apache and be just as fast, None of my clients have page loads over about .5 second. I use Quad core Xeon CPU's at 2.66Ghz with 6 gigs of Ram. And I never run my servers above 75% capacity. I just get another one at that point. I have a 30 day money back guarantee if you're not satisfied. The only thing I don't have is an EU server. I can get into Munich though. But I currently host people in the UK who have no issues.
Just a thought for you if you want to try it. If you don't like it, it costs you nothing.
Thanks,
Steve