Hosting PF & PS

[PoolDoc]

After reflection, I thought it might be appropriate to extend this a bit.


Update (June 22): people are confusing page views and hits. PF pageviews are running 400,000/month as noted below. "Hits" are running about (I just checked the logs) about 6,000,000 / month. Most of sites folks have mentioned, as comparable, are actually a small fraction of that.


On occasion, I have gotten offers to help with the hosting, coding, or development of the Pool Forum and the server on which it resides. The value of those offers has been often limited by lack of information about the Pool Forum. For obvious reasons, I don't want to share everything, but I think I can share things that might help those offering assistance focus their efforts.

Much of my knowledge about what's available from various hosts is 'stale'. Those with current experience may be able to correct me. But often the offers I receive reflect experience with much lower traffic sites, which makes me uncertain of how that advice would 'scale'.

The Pool Forum (poolforum.com) is the daughter site of Pool Solutions (poolsolutions.com). I don't use any formal site metrics tools, but external tracking suggests that the sites together receive over 100,000 unique visitors per month during peak months (May, June, July, August)., and well over 600,000 page views. PoolSolutions pages are almost all static, but the most viewed Pool Forum pages are not only served dynamically, but cannot be cached because of frequent changes. It is my understanding that few if any shared hosting solutions are able to support a dynamic page view rate of 400,000+ pages / month, plus 200,000+ static page views.

Corresponding bandwidth requirements are in the 30 to 50 Gbyte/month range, but we expect them to increase substantially as we enable some of the photo, community, and social features for subscribers. Storage requirements are currently trivial, but again, will increase as we enable those features.

The software environment is pure LAMP: Slackware Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP.

The Iptables firewall was hand coded by me in Bash. Currently, I could use help from someone who has successfully implemented Iptables firewalls using Ipsets to enable dynamic response to various issues. Where practical, traffic from bogons and from non-English speaking IP blocks in RIPE, LACNIC, and APNIC is blocked. Traffic from those areas, even where the user is a legitimate English speaking pool owner, leads to confusion on the Forum when questions are asked. Differences in piping, electrical supplies, available chemicals, and pool equipment mean that US based advice is really not applicable to most non-US locations, Australia being an exception. Ideally, the firewall would be updated to allow access to PoolSolutions worldwide, and block access only the Pool Forum.

The Sendmail mail server does a variety of mail forwarding tasks, as well as supporting all the Forum email functions. Because of the volume of notifications and such, the email function is critical. In the past (distant past in Internet terms), shared servers, at least with the ISP's investigated, did not support this well. Even in the current shrunken state of the Pool Forum, mail volume runs to a 1,000 emails per day or more. The problem here is not load on the Sendmail function, but access to a server allowing such outflow, especially where clean up tasks may involve sending to a large number of dead email addresses.

The forum software is the latest patch of vBulletin 3.8. I'm purchased the 4.0 license, but downgraded till I can get on the new server, since 4.0 is 'heavier' than 3.8 AND less familiar. Annual licensing run around $250, in order to receive all patches.

For obvious reasons, it's not prudent to discuss how administrative access to the server is established.

The server currently is an old 1.4 Ghz Athlon with 1 GByte RAM. Current loads run 60 - 85% during peak periods. We anticipate that the current server will NOT be adequate in the week prior to July 4th, when user loads are likely to peak seasonally. The new server will be Slackware running on dual core 2.6 GHz Athlon with 3 Gbyte RAM. It's just a consumer grade Compaq with a multi-speed low power Athlon and with upgraded fans, power supply and drives. Once everything is in place, I want to look at installing one of the PHP accelerators. I would welcome the chance to talk to anyone with practical experience with this.

The next step, to the best of my knowledge, in improving capacity would be to install a RAID6 disk array with MDADM. This could be done with the existing server, but would probably be more practical with a new server. However, a RAID array are future projects that would depend on how the Pool Forum does financially this season, and what load levels look like after a PHP accelerator is in place.

Optimizing MySQL is something I know almost nothing about. I have no idea whether my current setup, which is configured for data safety rather than speed, could be significantly improved.

There. That's it for now.

Ben
"PoolDoc"