How many sites are you putting on each server?

FireLizard

I'm curious how many sites per server you all are running.

My plan is 50 sites on each 8 core / 16 GB / 600-700 GB VPS. Mostly WordPress, averaging about 10 GB each. Putting a hundred on a beast of an IOFlood dedicated has tempted me (even more so now that I see InterServer has reduced specs on their VPS - very low storage now).

Your turn.

JohnB

FireLizard Putting a hundred on a beast of an IOFlood dedicated has tempted me

Their AMD servers could definitely handle that. They are a very reliable provider with reliable hardware but the more sites you put on a single server the more down sites you have when there is a failure.

Either way is perfectly fine but I personally prefer multiple small VPS's with a good CPU (ie dedicated cores). If one VPS fails I don't have 100 customers upset and recovery is faster because I'm not restoring 10GB * 100 of data and avoid the need for a 10gbs backup server. However, the hosting provider running on a dedicated machine will always be faster.

One thing to keep in mind is lets say the server fails with 100 sites. Do you have other server(s) that can accommodate those 100 sites or will you have to spin up a new dedicated server? How long does that take with your provider? Or if you plan to spin up multiple smaller VPS until dedicated is fixed, will the VPS provider block you due to "unusually activity" when you suddenly try to spin up 10 servers? This has happened to me. Fortunately it wasn't recovery situation but their "anti abuse technology" flagged it

cosmoshosting

It ultimately depends on the sites you are hosting. If they are being mostly served from cache you can host thousands. If they are dynamic Woocommerce stores with 80 plugins you will be chewing through resources big time.

8 proper vCPU and 16GB ram you should be easily able to host 50-100 WordPress like sites without any issues.
With enhance I find you are memory limited before anything else, the latest updates have come along way in reducing this.
To give you a benchmark, most 'good' shared hosting providers would cap out at around 300 cPanel accounts on a server spec like this, less reputable providers will put closer and over 1000.

Using cPFence helps us cut down a substantial amount of abusive traffic that was causing load spikes.

Shaijee

cosmoshosting Zoinkies JohnB For 50 sites, each averaging 500–1,000 visits, what system resources do you recommend for optimal performance on this type of server?

FireLizard

Thanks for your info.

I'm tempted to add more than 50 (maybe 100) but then concerned about disaster recovery taking very long (I am on 10 Gbps ports for servers and backups) with these being 10 GB sites on average or temporary outages affecting a larger number of sites than necessary. Easier to manage more smaller servers than few larger servers is my thinking. My clients are in the low to moderate range of traffic (under 300 visitors daily). Pretty well-cached WP sites.

nhybgtvfr

for disaster recovery... assuming it's the whole server, i would recommend having the website / db files on mounted storage. ie AWS EBS, DO's VBS, hetzners volumes.. or whatever alternative your datacentre hosting provides..
this data should already be replicated in multiple places by them, so even if your webserver is down. the actual website/db files should still be ok and easily remounted to be accessible.

not in any way advocating this as an alternative to keeping backups of everything, but it should mean that you can rebuild/reinstall a failed server, restore just the client configs quickly, and remount the actual storage data. no need to wait while restoring hundreds of GB's of data from backups.

Zoinkies

50-75 for commerce customers
100-125 for static websites etc

Ultimately depends on specification.

cosmoshosting

Shaijee
Many WordPress sites require min 1GB, sometimes up to 2GB if loaded with plugins and theme managers.
vCPU's and resources should be part of your plan. A good starting plan is 2GB memory, 2x vCPU assuming you have the hardware to back it up.

From the several very large hosting providers I've personally worked at, disaster recovery is important but their is certainly an element of 'Just Wait' (within 24 hours) and pay out the SLA, especially for 'Shared Hosting' where commercial viability is the primary focus.
Complete irrecoverable server failures is rare, with single account recovery being the most important factor. If your customers are prepared to pay, you should be pointing them towards a VPS or snapshotting the entire VPS once a day.

""anti abuse technology" flagged it"
Well yea, shitty hosts with shitty support can do that to you. Points fingers aggressively towards OVH. Many problem simply vanish with a good provider.

JohnB

Shaijee For 50 sites, each averaging 500–1,000 visits,

Per day or month lol?

Zoinkies

Honestly, I just leave everything on unlimited. Granted I have stupidly powerful servers, which can handle it - but it helps solve a lot of issues I have faced with Enhance.

JohnB

cosmoshosting Well yea, shitty hosts with shitty support can do that to you.

Was actually Vultr which isn't usually considered a shitty provider. You are correct that a lot of problems are avoided by using good providers but never rely on a provider handling anything in a timely manner or providing access to your snapshots.

The only meaningful backups are ones outside the control of the hosting provider, among other things.

Shaijee

JohnB Per day or month lol?

Per Month, LOL

JohnB

Shaijee My main income isn't hosting so I don't try to cram as many sites onto a server as possible, just enough to be profitable. I use VPS's and a general rule of thumb I follow is 1gb min per site and up to double the core count. So a 4 vCPU VPS would host a max of 8 sites for me. In reality you can have much higher density with proper server optimization.

On properly optimized bare metal machines I've never had issues with 3-4x the core count and again that could be much higher.

webnestify

I recommend 10 websites per each dedicated CPU core. Woo commerce max 1 site per CPU core (that depends how busy/big is woo commerce site ).

Kosta

Dedicated CPU with 10cores and 20 threads gives you the ability to run 200 websites each on 1v cpu at maximum.
Simple calculations

MarkNLD

With 10 vCPU's we easily host 1000 websites. The underlying hardware is insane though 😃

JohnB

MarkNLD Curious what is the underlying CPU that can support that density? Or is this hosting static sites?

salp

Our prices are quite higher, so we essentially load around 2-300 websites per server.

We utilize the AMD Ryzen 9950x's, 192GB Ram and NVMe's.

Performance wise, off the roof.

FYI, we've interconnected these servers utilizing Proxmox to move VM's around if we ever need too easily.

eddiecheng

we normally put 10-20 websites per VM . 64gb ram , 500gb nvme. All our customer's website loads like bullets.