Hi Guys,

Don't ask me for details about the sites :-) but I am planning to run about 500 websites by mid 2007. I'm already running about 40 of them on a low-end server from Servermatrix (2.4 Celeron, 1 GB Ram, Red Hat Enterprise, Mysql and Apache). These 40 sites are just a testrun although some of the sites already receive about 1000 unique visitors per day. All sites are using Mysql to fetch their configuration parameters (title, description, links, etc). It's like a single CMS for a large number of websites. I will be running about 10 of these CMSs to run the 500 websites. I will be implementing these sites at a rate of 40 per month.

How much servers and which configuration and type of servers do I need to run this number of websites ? I was thinking of about 50 websites per server on a low-end server. With 50 websites per server I will be running about 10 servers though which makes it hard to manage. Is virtual hosting a solution ? I was thinking of about 2,5$ per site/month which is the monthly cost of the dedicated server I'm running now.

Thx for your opinion,
Flixxx

It really depends on how busy the sites are and the complexity/size of their scripts/databases.

RAM will be the most important thing - I'd go for a dual core Total Control box with 2Gb RAM which should be able to host a good number of sites.

The only way to see what you need is to judge it as you go along

Hi Beansprout,

The sites are single page websites with dynamic content (and no, they're not made for Adsense :-) ). I'm expecting about 1000 unique visitors per site/day on average (based on the testrun I'm doing now). Is the dual core machine with 2 GB RAM for one cluster of 50 websites ? I know that some of the smaller hosting companies cram about 300 websites on a single (high-end) server. Would it help to put the database on a dedicated server and use the other servers as pure webservers ? Isn't there a tool somewhere available that can give you an estimate of how much traffic/websites you can handle on a server with a certain configuration ? Is there a way to calculate this ?

Flixxx

I'm guessing the databases will all be quite small, ie only a few paragraphs of text?

1000 uniques a day isn't a lot - the useful statistic is the number of pageviews really - the server I mentioned can handle hundreds of thousands of pageviews per day and several hundred websites, including ones with large databases, so I shouldn't imagine you'll need more than a couple of servers

The only way to know is to see how it goes, unless you have identical hardware available to test your site on, or lots of time to attempt some simulations which may or may not be accurate (I wouldn't bother personally)

I don't think sticking 500 web sites on one server is a lot. Just do the proper optimizations (eAccelerator, MySQL Qcache, etc).
More RAM can definitely help you out; nothing less than 2GB. Giving Qcache more memory to cache to will help. I run XOOPS CMS w/ IPB for one of my biggest sites and 1/2 the queries are Qcache hits. eAccelerator can also be your best friend as I've seen my page generation times go down 50%-60%.

A Opty box with 2GB RAM should be able to handle it with no problems at all.

Mid-June one of my sleeper domains, what I refer to a customer domain which uses limited resources, traffic increased from 150 unique sessions per day to 261,000 unique sessions per day. They are increasing still. Nothing clandestant, just became popular after a mention in Digg.com. This one customer is now using 80% of a single server.

How many domains can a single server host? I've been hosting websites since 1994 and hosting email servers since 1988. From my experience a server can host 1/32nd of a domain to 6200+ domains. It depends on the TRAFFIC, hardware and application.

Where TRAFFIC is the real determining factor!

John