Thanks Dreamhost

#1

Just pottering round the admin panel and realised I haven;t been in the forums for a few months now. To be honest over the 3 years I’ve been with you I’ve only had to come here twice to see why a server was down… and although there was always the condemnations the problems were all speedily fixed and it all seems so far away I can hardly remember what it was… hardware I think.

Anyway… for those maybe thinking about Dreamhost I’d recommended them. even it’s just for the lip curling news letter every month :smiley:

I currently have:

Hosting Plan:
L3: two year rebill.
Domains Hosted:
26 plus 7 subdomains
Next Rebill Date:
2008-10-10 (and this will be renewed)
Disk Usage:
617.2 GB
2 GB / week
Bandwidth Usage:
12392 GB

Thanks.

…oh and for those of you thinking about the shared hosting, I heard somewhere about hosting services putting 100 domains on one server maybe more, I was checking mine a while back using a whois site that show the first 5 domains hosted with yours and the total number. Out of all 26 Domains the max was 22.

Thought it was an interesting bit of info.

#2

Frankly speaking, it is not easy to manage shared servers. Good job DH!

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#3

The term “server” can be a bit ambiguous - it can refer to an IP address, a software server (Apache), or a physical piece of hardware. I’m guessing the whois-based report is based on the site IP addresses. So it tells you that Dreamhost runs about 20 sites on each IP address, but that doesn’t mean that each hardware server only has 20 sites. Also, the whois-based services may not have complete info, especially about non-com/net/org sites (for example, they often don’t list .cn sites from China).

As far as I can tell, Dreamhost runs a bunch of Apache2 HTTP servers on each hardware server. Each instance of Apache has its own IP address. I can’t directly see how many sites are assigned to the hardware-server, but one can sample the active set of sites (domains and sub-domains handling a hit). This morning about 400 sites were running on my account’s hardware-server. Since most sites are inactive/low-traffic, I would speculate that there could easily be 400-800 sites (domains+sub-domains) on my account’s hardware-server.

Note, I’m not saying these numbers are good or bad (or even accurate) in terms of shared hosting services. Like most people on Dreamhost, I’m just a low-volume user (a luser?), mainly interested in low-cost hosting.

Here’s the detailed info I gleaned from my account (all number are for the whole hardware server):

Server Hardware: 2-Core AMD Opteron with 4 GiB of memory
Apache2 instances (each with its own IP address): ~50

Active domains/sub-domains this morning (7-8AM EST): ~400 (average 8 per IP address)

Average daily stats across all Apache instances (based on 5 days of data):

Average daily hits: ~1.6 million
Average daily traffic: ~460 GiB

Of course, it’s also possible that the “hardware” I see is actually just a virtual machine running on a huge blade system (but maybe I’m just a virtual person running in some galactic version of “The Sims” :slight_smile:

#4

Thank s Habilis, that’s some really interesting insights which I wasn’t aware of and I’m sure a lot of people will find pretty interesting.

~So if we were living in a Virtual World floating in a Virtual Sphere of Matter and Motion and among this was our Virtual thoughts put on our Virtual Blogs on the the Virtual Servers which reside on Virtual Hardware, would I be right in thinking that if this were all recorded moment by moment in some Virtual Memory would it be Virtually impossible to tell the difference between Reality and a Virtual Burn?

#5

Be careful, Dreamhost has a watchdog kill-bot script that will kill any process that uses too much virtual memory.

If you think too deeply about our Virtual World, the kill-bot will come after you in the “real” world! :wink:

#6

ooh… your making me paranoid now. As they say, just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

;q

#7

There’s really no reason to be paranoid, especially if you consider the quantum chromodynamics of virtual… [Knock Knock] Hold on a minute, someone is at the door…

Hello? … No, I can explain my /tmp file usage! … A terabyte?!? Wait! Stop! Arrrgggg!

VIRTUAL USER PROCESS HABILIS TERMINATED
+++
ATH0

#8