More servers or a more powerful server?

wrapper

Hey

I've migrated a lot of my clients sites to Enhance and getting close to 90% memory usage, which is not a huge surprise to me.

This is the first time I've been able to chain servers together the way that Enhance offers. So should I consider splitting the load between multiple servers, or just beef up the specs on the one I currently have? Is there any adv/disadvantage either way, other than a potential cost difference?

Thanks!

SharedGrid

More servers, then if you have an issue on one only a subset of your customers are affected which makes it easier for DR purposes.

cosmoshosting

What are your current specs?

Web hosting certainly has an 'economics of scale' where having a larger server can help better absorb load spikes and the background noise. If cloud hosting it may also allow you to switch to higher performing dedicated vCPU threads for overall faster hosting.
Also reduced licencing costs if you have extra software such as cPGuard/cPFence.

The disadvantages of larger servers with more subscribed users is if it goes down you have more affected sites and it can take longer to restore from backup. Ensure you have a reliable monitoring solution setup!

At-least on cPanel and DirectAdmin, I find this sweet spot around 8 cores, 256GB ram, 2TB disk space and 200ish users.

If CPU usage on your server is still quite low and you are over 8GB of ram, I'd explore giving it a little more swap to play around with if you haven't already.

wrapper

It appears my server made the decision for me, it was clearly underspecced for the requirements of running a number of containerised sites so I have increased the ram and vcores.

Thanks

Isaia-Arknet_PTY_LTD

The initial idea of Enhance with more servers instead of one DA, cPanel, etc., server that is "big and strong" quickly vanished when additional paid tools were required.

Once you consider that it is not as easy as spinning another hardware up, but instead consider all the required Licenses to be used for each new server, it can become very quickly the wrong decision 🙂

It definitely makes sense if there are many sites per server, but it does not make sense when there are one or a few sites, and you want LS + protection and any other bells.

To be considered 🙂

ClouderNode

Of course you have all the extras that come with it. But as a business your model should cover that anyway.
Adding another server into the mix shouldn't break the bank. Normally I have a server that's already on standby ready to go and not being used. Yes I'm paying for licenses and things on a non allocated production server but that leaves you ready to go in a instant.

If you model supports that, then it is easy as just adding another server.

But also depends on what your base is. Are you running over allocated servers or underselling them a little bit to conserve.
A Lot of factors play into that.