Beyond Linode 2880?

Oh yeah, every website owner dreams of those ultra-successful sites once in a while….

A friend of mine was looking for a new host for a pretty big site last summer, so I made some inqueries on his behalf. In a nutshell,

1) You can buy multiple Linode 2880's and load balance among them. (e.g. 1 DB server, 2 web servers with DNS round robin, etc.) This would probably be the best solution, because we've got a private network here.

2) If your site is really big, you can buy an entire host node for $799.75 (5 x $159.95, because each host can run a maximum of 5 Linode 2880's) and ask Linode staff to slice it up the way you like it. (e.g. 1 Linode 5760 + 1 Linode 8640, or maybe even a Linode 14400!) This is only allowed if you buy the entire host node.

Of course you can get dedicated hosting for much less than that. (By the way, the friend mentioned above settled for a dedicated server elsewhere, because his wallet wasn't thick enough.) But in that case you don't get the benefit of Linode's fantastic features and support.

Just in case it ever comes up, how do you handle moving to a new host? I assume "Back up everything", "restore everything", and then "change DNS". Doesn't it take a day or two for the DNS change to propagate and point to the new host?

On the other hand, if my site needs more than a Linode 2880, I probably have other things to do than worry about the cost!

I wonder if I could rent a full server through Linode for a price comparable to other hosts? It's just sitting in their datacenter anyway, so why not give a discount for someone renting a full server?

Or, is Linode's hardware better than other hosts, making a Linode 14400 really worth more than a dedicated server elsewhere?

You are going to need to somewhere in the range of 100,000,000+ hits per month to need anything over a 720 :-)

I run forum on one of my 720's that averages 100-120 concurrent users and typically gets close to 100m hits per month with no issue.

The key is a well configured server/memory optimization :-)

Host migrations in the same datacenter don't require an IP change :)

You put in a ticket, and once it's set up, shut down and click the migrate when you're ready. Then the disk images are copied over to the new host automatically.

Note that anyone without the 'Linode.com staff' badge under their name is just a customer, so for the final word on a deal like that (which, I imagine, would be negotiated on an individual basis) you'll want to wait for one of them to chime in.

I'm planning to do a plain vanilla PHP setup, with some customized C/C++ code if necessary. Version 1.0 will be 100% PHP/LAMP.

That's a good point. As long as you have a reasonably intelligent site design, you shouldn't need too much hardware.

Hopefully, my site can grow faster than Moore's law gets me better hardware!

I'm planning to only serve plaintext, so I shouldn't be running into any limits. I was just planning ahead.

@fsk:

Or, is Linode's hardware better than other hosts, making a Linode 14400 really worth more than a dedicated server elsewhere?

Try finding a dual quad-core Xeon server with 16GB of high-quality RAM, 500GB+ of high-quality hard drives in RAID, 8TB of premium gigabit bandwidth, and all of Linode's functionality for $799 elsewhere. (These numbers were pulled straight out of the Linode 2880 specs and multiplied by 5. As someone posted above, you'll need to ask a Linode staff for the exact configuration and price.)

A dedicated server with a roughly similar configuration as above and 8TB of bandwidth would cost $1439/m with SoftLayer, and maybe a little less with budget hosts.

That's good to know. Buying a Linode 14400, I'd still be getting comparable value to elsewhere.

I'm just planning ahead. I don't want to be stuck moving hosts if I'm successful! One guy said that I probably won't need more than a 720 unless I'm spectacularly successful.

@fsk:

Just in case it ever comes up, how do you handle moving to a new host? I assume "Back up everything", "restore everything", and then "change DNS". Doesn't it take a day or two for the DNS change to propagate and point to the new host?

With normal time-to-live values, yes it can take a day or two. You control the TTL yourself though so you can set it to whatever you want. If you're expecting an IP address change, you can even set the TTL to 0 which means no caching whatsoever. Your DNS server might get hammered, but no one will end up stuck with the old IP address.

@fsk:

One guy said that I probably won't need more than a 720 unless I'm spectacularly successful.
@MrRx7:

I run forum on one of my 720's that averages 100-120 concurrent users and typically gets close to 100m hits per month with no issue.

100,000,000 hits per month = 3,300,000 hits per day = 38 hits per second. Let's say peak traffic is 10 times the average. That's a maximum of 380 hits per second. Not at all difficult to pull off with lighttpd or nginx, provided that the dynamic stuff is well optimized.

Set the bar higher! Anyone getting a billion hits per month on a Linode? :P