About the Server Upgrades Last Weekend
As many of you might already know, we migrated the site last weekend to a brand new server with much better specs:
- Old Server: Dedicated Virtual from MediaTemple with 1GB RAM
- New Server: Quad Core Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2×250GB HDD from The Planet
I've had good luck with MediaTemple over the last year, but a virtual server can only scale so far before it starts to have issues, and they don't have any other upgrade path, so I had to look elsewhere.
I plan to use this server for a long while, and expect it to scale to a great deal of traffic in the next year, so I also switched from Apache to LiteSpeed, which is a commercial web server that is supposed to scale a lot better on a single server, but is also much faster in general.
From their benchmarks page:
They also have an administration panel so you can easily make changes on the fly… there's a "graceful restart" feature that allows you to restart the server without kicking anybody off.
One of the features that's just really cool (and kinda strange) is that you can actually Compile PHP from within their web-based admin panel. You can even include an opcode cache like APC or xcache, just by checking a button. Sure, it's not entirely useful for those of us used to compiling, but it's a rather nifty feature since it saves your last configure options and allows you to apply those to a new PHP version with the click of a button.
Now that I have a great deal more memory I can finally start to do some interesting things with memcached. (more on that in the future).
Very big changes coming…
(mt) offers servers beyond the 1GB (dv) Extreme. The (dpv) Nitro exceeds the specs of the server you have now and (dv) => (dpv) migrations are handled "in-place" meaning you won't have to reconfigure everything.
Feel free to check it out: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/nitro/techspecs.htm
Best,
Arman Zakaryan
(mt) Media Temple, Inc.
http://www.mediatemple.net/
That's true, I should have mentioned the Nitro. Of course, it's also $750 per month, which is more than double what I'm paying for nearly the same thing, and 50% more than a server with exactly identical specs.
I've had good luck with you guys over the last year, and I have personally recommended MediaTemple to dozens of other site owners.
Cool, just thought I'd drop by and let you know in case you hadn't heard about it.
We know it's a bit of a gap from the Extreme to Nitro in terms of the price, but part of the reason why the Nitro costs what it does is the high-speed disk configuration. As you can see from the tech specs it has 2x 300GB 15k RPM SAS drives which can do around 350 disk io/sec. Drives that offer this sort of performance boost your server's overall speed and also keeps you going strong when things get busy.
In any case, congratulations on a successful migration and we appreciate the business you've sent us!
Arman.
I still do recommend MediaTemple to almost everybody, and I still have a Grid Server account as well that I'll continue to use… can't beat the Grid Server for affordable but scalable hosting.
Congratulations on the success!