Advice on servers hardware

jgrispa

I an new and i am just starting. After trying xcloud (which i would say it's very good and easy) I moved to Enhance.

My current setup is:
CP on Hetzner (3 vCPU shared, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe)
WP / Database on Hetzner (2 vCPU - dedicated, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe)
Backup / DNS on Hetzner (3 vCPU shared, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe + 80 GB storage volume)
Email / DNS on Contabo for $5 (4 vCPU shared, 6 GB RAM, 400 GB SSD)

Still unsure if i will continue DNS roles or just stop and rely on Cloudflare's integration. Any suggestions on what to do here?
Also, Are the servers i am using as CP and backup good for those roles or maybe they are too much? Would a 2vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB NVMe storage work as CP and backup (I also have an extra 80 GB volume for backups).

I instead of the 2 vCPU - dedicated, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe I am using for WP/database I switch to 3 vCPU shared, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe will the downgrade be noticeable?

I am on a budget so I am tryint to save without compromising performance. Right know I am serving 7 websites (among public ones and staging)

Thanks

JohnB

jgrispa I instead of the 2 vCPU - dedicated, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe I am using for WP/database I switch to 3 vCPU shared, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe will the downgrade be noticeable?

Really depends on the sites you host. Busy ecommerce type sites would be impacted but mostly static sites should be fine.

If I recall you can upgrade from shared to dedicated CPU on heztner but not the other way. So if my memory is correct you could start with shared and upgrade if needed.

FYI You'll probably need to configure MySQL for best performance regardless of server. Sometimes newbies here post "why is enhance slow xyz panel is fast on same server" and its because xyz panel uses non-default MySQL configs that benchmark well. Enhance uses totally default configs that you need to customize best for your needs.

Cloudflare nameservers will outperform anything you selfhost (enhance or otherwise) and have better uptime while being free.

sikmo

jgrispa just one thing.

We did a large scale testing with hetzner cloud and "shared" CPU was absolute disaster. You leave it for more than 30-60s without a single request and for next requests the wait 2-7s for CPU time. So bear in mind that it can hurt performance.

Not sure how much they "steal" CPU time when you are using it actively for more vCPU though. So that maybe fine. But the fact that cURL in many apps are setup for 5s period and there is possibility they will not access one of your websites / other things, made me never use shared CPU anywhere.

twest

I would say your infrastructure setup depends on your use case. If you're building a hosting company then you're doing good as is and no reason to try penny pinching when things are already on a relatively low budget. If you're just building for your personal sites and friends/family, then yeah you're probably way overkilling it - I prolly wouldn't even use a backup server, you can just download a backup periodically to your local drive.

As far as running things commercially goes, I'm a big supporter of having a beefcake backup server. The reason is because in a disaster scenario you want to get back online as quickly as possible, so eliminating bottlenecks is huge. So you want to have good CPU, good ram, good network speed, good read/write on the storage. That's gonna eliminate most bottlenecks that could form from the backup servers side. The other big thing I recommend is have a spare Hosting server setup and sitting "on standby", so it has config all done and it's 100% ready to host sites. The reason for that is again about disaster recovery, if a server takes a shit and you need to restore all the sites that were on it from the backup server, it'd be a big time saver to already have a clean server fully setup and ready to go - so all you have to do is click a few buttons in Enhance and BOOM it starts restoring sites to the standby server. Standby server might shave half an hour off your recovery times, very significant depending on when a server decides to take a shit on you.

The DNS servers are really only useful if you're planning to sell hosting service using automation. So a person can signup for a plan on your site, then your billing software rolls everything out for them, so they can have a fully functioning WP site in a matter of minutes without any human interaction (they buy domain through your billing, then your billing sets up the hosting and points domain NS at your DNS servers, bingo bongo it all gets connected)... If you plan to do everything by hand, "white glove setup", then you don't really need the DNS servers, you can just use Cloudflare like you mentioned, which is great for a variety of reasons.

jgrispa

twest

Thanks for your valuable experience . Yah, i am just starting, so I really want to sleep at nights knowing sites are up. About automation, It's something I have considered but I would need to add another server (for shared hosting). My initial idea was to offer hosting to customers I build websites for (3 customers so far), so i may be better off offering managed hosting. What I tell them is "I can build your website and I garantee your site will be fast, faster than any other shared hosting you can find. Maybe website management and hosting as a package. Then later on I can expand to selling automated shared hosting packages

jgrispa

JohnB

I am a newbie indeed 😊 Do you any MySQL config that you could share and will improve performance?

victoryel

JohnB

If I recall you can upgrade from shared to dedicated CPU on heztner but not the other way.

Hi!
I played with the option to test "every" server on Hetzner yesterday. Make sure that you have the checkmark on CPU and RAM only before switching. You can switch from shared > dedicated > shared > dedicated anytime. I could also switch between Intel and AMD while testing (can't switch to ARM).

twest

jgrispa yeah I wouldn't worry about automating things just yet. Since you're just learning how to be a sysadmin and run your own hosting company on top of design business, that's too much to be also learning a complicated billing platform like whmcs and getting into the shit of automation and selling blindly to the public. Doing everything yourself manually can be sold as a positive too, giving clients a "white glove" setup, lots of small companies do that.

Search through the forums here, there's a ton of useful info about pretty much everything, including optimizing your servers for php/Apache/MySQL.

nqnoc

Seems like a good start setup. I will only advise about using Contabo. Is not very reliable.
If you need top uptime do not use Contabo. Netcup or Avoro are better alternatives.

xyzulu

jgrispa any MySQL config that you could share and will improve performance?

https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl

JohnB

jgrispa Search here for SQL config and you'll find a thread with some good info. However you really need to understand what each line in a config you copy from does. Mysql doc site explains everything very well.

For example some config options give a huge performance boost but risks data loss or corruption in SOME situations and would be completely unacceptable for some sites. Also there isnt a one size fits all config as it heavily depends on server. Config for a beefy server isn't the same for a small VPS.

JohnB

victoryel Oh sweet good to know! Does CPU/Memory change require restart?

mike

@jgrispa Good luck man! Don't use contabo in general and especially for outgoing email.

jgrispa

Looking at Netcup. Cheap pricing
Is VPS 500 G11s iv or VPS 1000 G11 good to run an email server? Outoging mail will go through Smarthost.

Also, WP and backups servers are currently both on Hetzner at the same location. Options:

Leave it as is
Keep using Hetzner and move backup to a different location
Move backup server to Netcup VPS 1000 G11 (different provider different location)

Sorry to keep asking. Trying to learn as much as I can.

jgrispa

ohhh I am located in Panama (Americas) and currently all my servers are located in the US. For what I saw on their website VPS 500 G11 would be located in Germany while VPS 1000 G11 can be placed in the US. Does it makes a difference for a mail server? What about for backups?

victoryel

JohnB Yes 🙂 Power off > Rescale > Power on 🙂

cosmoshosting

sikmo Came here to say this.
Your experience is similar to mine. The Shared vCPU can be a real disaster for web hosting. Far better experience on the dedicated cores and even the ARM64 machines (which enhance does not support yet)