Server recommendations
I am planning to create a server to host an online community.
Do you recommend a 32 bit version or 64?
And which guides should I follow, the LAMP guide for sure, but then for the email, to be able to send from the server, and to get notifications in the server.
Thank you.
22 Replies
As for guides, I would start with the getting started stuff in the Library here:
Those guides will walk you through setting up everything needed to run an efficient server.
Hope this helps, and welcome to Linode.
As for 32bit or 64bit, I asked the same question way back once, and the conclusion is that if you have to ask this question, 32bit is the right one for you.
I don't remember much of the details, but I do remember lower overheads and no performance gains as far as I know of/ will use.
My 2 cents.
As for the guide I already read it, but it does not show me what I need. In a community, usually people send emails to each other, so what will I need?
However, from experience my advice is to worry about growing your server WHEN you get your million-th member, not before ..
You have a lot to worry about at this stage than to worry about 32bit vs 64bit…
@fernandoch:
I guess you know that you cannot change from 32 to 64 bits on the fly. In order to use more than 4 GB of RAM you need 64 bits…
Maybe not to a single Linode on the fly, but it's certainly easy enough to spin up a separate Linode (or even just a new distribution on your current Linode depending on disk space) as a 64-bit distribution if you reach that point and move over your local setup. At that scale you'll likely be continuing to evolve the separation between front end, database and other services anyway. And in fact, horizontal scaling of such features can put off actually needing any single Linode that large for quite some time. Easily re-creating machines for new distributions or configurations is one of the benefits of the VPS environment.
In the meantime, using 64-bit on the smaller Linode configurations is just going to waste a lot of memory - which is a limited resource - without providing any practical gains, so I'm not really sure why it would ever be preferred.
– David
A postfix is enough? But how will the users send mails to each other?
1) Outsource to something like google apps or
2) Use citadel
3) Use dovecot/postfix/mysql
If you only need to send email, postfix is fine.
The order you gave to each option is by complexity of the setup or by recommendation?
Outsourcing means you don't have to deal with spam filters etc but google apps costs when you need more than 50 accounts.
Citadel is an all in one package and may provide more than you need and will require a larger linode (a 1gb-2gb should suffice)
Postfix will be more complicated to set up since it's made of lots of components but you can pick and choose what you want.
Personally I outsource.
I have the domain registered with a shared hosting –> I can control there the emails easily. But I want to use linode for my hosting. Can i just point to the linode server for the hosting purposes and keep the email in the shared hosting?
Do you think that can be done?
Thank you again
@obs:
google apps costs when you need more than 50 accounts
The limit is now 10 for free google apps accounts.
> As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for example.com at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team
@Guspaz:
Wonderful. What was free yesterday costs $3000 per year today. Google Apps might be a cost savings for enterprises, but for non-profits, small businesses, or individuals, it's a ripoff.
Heck, go back further (when the older limit was in the hundreds of accounts - this is at least the third decrease since Google Apps introduction) and the gap was even larger. This is really just a continuation of a long trend. Hopefully this is as low as they'll ever go.
Whether it's a rip-off sort of depends on the other options available and what they cost versus the features they provide. While the non-free Google Apps definitely isn't the cheapest around, from what I can see they're still competitive, though definitely not the cheapest.
– David
E-mail is important to our operations, but it's not important enough to spend 1-2% of our annual budget when money is already extremely tight for non-profits such as ours.
@Guspaz:
When you're a non-profit, and the choice is between "have the unpaid IT department do e-mail in-house on the existing linode for $0", or "pay Google several percent of our budget to do e-mail for us", which option do you think seems more reasonable? :P
Guess it would depend on whether I was the unpaid IT department or not :-) I'm still not quite sure it's fair to call GA a rip-off, since in-house (unpaid or not) still ends up costing, even if only in IT time.
Hmm, actually, if I were the unpaid IT department, I might even consider spending my time on setting up multiple GA accounts with a primary domain account using groups to forward to the sub-domain accounts, which were configured to be able to send mail as if from the primary domain.
– David
@Guspaz:
When you're a non-profit, and the choice is between "have the unpaid IT department do e-mail in-house on the existing linode for $0", or "pay Google several percent of our budget to do e-mail for us", which option do you think seems more reasonable?
:P E-mail is important to our operations, but it's not important enough to spend 1-2% of our annual budget when money is already extremely tight for non-profits such as ours.
If your organization is under 3,000 users, you can apply for the free Google Apps for Education through the Google for Nonprofits site.
note: a little further reading and I found that for this, they mean 501©3, so if your non-profit is under a different section like a (c)7 club or a (c)8 fraternity, no luck. Since they specifically say 501(c)3, they're writing it off as a donation.
1) 501©3 is for charities only, which rules out most non-profits. We're not a charity, we're a non-profit. All charities are non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities. Most aren't, I'd imagine.
2) 501(c)3 status is only granted to US companies. So that's also a problem for us, not being in the US and all.
@Guspaz:
There are two problems with that:
1) 501©3 is for charities only, which rules out most non-profits. We're not a charity, we're a non-profit. All charities are non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities. Most aren't, I'd imagine.
2) 501(c)3 status is only granted to US companies. So that's also a problem for us, not being in the US and all.
yeah, they're being misleading with that calling it "for nonprofits" when they mean "for charities".
Hopefully you were signed up before the change, the email I got said I was grandfathered.