Server Costs - High Traffic Websites

Server Config
1

Hello,

I have a client with a site (wordpress blog) that gets 10,000 + hits a day. I need to find him a dedicated managed server so that his site runs smoothly and also has no outages. I just received a quote from another host for his Managed Dedicated Servers.

[INDENT]CPU1: Intel Xeon 5310 Clovertown (Quad Core)
CPU2: Intel Xeon 5310 Clovertown (Quad Core)
Total CPU Cores: Eight (8)
System RAM: 6144MB (6GB) DDR2 ECC Registered System RAM
Primary Hard Disk: 73GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 15,000 RPM High-Performance Hard Disk
Second Hard Disk: 250GB SATA-II 7,200 RPM Hard Disk (nightly backup disk)
Data Transfer: 2000GB Premium Monthly Bandwidth (100Mbps uplinked port)
Operating System: CentOS Enterprise Linux 5 64-Bit (x86_64)
Control Panel License: cPanel / WHM + Fantastico Auto Installer[/INDENT]

$695 a month

He posts about 5-10 blogs a day too, so it’s definitely a growing community website. He also has a forum with 6500 posts and 389 members.

Is this a reasonable price for a dedicated server? Would you recommend a different configuration of hardware that might make it cheaper? I would also like some examples of other sites on similar configurations if you have any, so that I can show my client what they use.

He’s also skeptical that sites that get more hits than he does have to pay that much for a server. Which is why I would like examples please. Let me know, I will appreciate any help I can get. I have just a few days to figure out what is going to happen with his site.

2

For a 10,000 visit a day site, he doesn’t need anything near that powerful. A single processor and 2GB RAM would be more than enough! I can handle at least 2 million visits per day to a dynamic site per server with 1/3rd that power.

You’re looking at more the $100-200 range. I personally like these dual-core Opteron setups for $179/month:
https://www.softlayer.com/order_form/order.html?so_id=18&ITEM_PRICES[disk0]=19

You can go even cheaper elsewhere, but Softlayer’s network and staff are worth more than they charge already.

3

That server can handle much more than that blog. Is there a performance problem with the current system to start with?

4

No. There were no server problems.
Found out it was a badly coded plugin for Wordpress. Problem solved, though still moved over to a new server.

Thanks.

5

I agree, even shared hosting would be adequate in this situation. Some of our clients, their blogs specifically, push 2k-10k unique visitors (50k-250k hits) per day.

6

While that does seem overkill, I’ve yet to find a truly “managed” server for $179. Lots of unmanaged ones and partly managed.

We have servers at two companies, ServInt and [url=http://www.rackspace.com]Rackspace, both of which have fully managed support. We’ve been very happy with both of them.

7

well hostgator has some managed servers too, and price starts from 180$