In reference to my previous blog post, I have decided to purchase only one of the Conroe servers, since our Apache / Squid server would benefit the most from the upgrade.
I’ve also asked for a quote as to how much a gig of ram would cost per month on the new server. I don’t plan on buying it outright, since I have no doubt that we may have to get additional servers (or take advantage of other deals) in the near future, given the present pace of technology.
So, as of right now, the quote I’m given (sans the RAM upgrade) is $159, which includes the upgrade from a 10 Mbps uplink to a 100 Mbps uplink.
Basically, what’s going down is that the Conroe will be our new Apache / Squid server, and will be codenamed Apollo.
The old Apollo (with that pesky 1 gig ram upgrade that we shelled out $250 for) will be renamed Athena, and will be configured to host our database.
And the old Athena will be written out of the show by “Greetings from Earth”… erm, I meant will be no more. (At least until someone else buys it from The Planet.)
So that’s what’s going on.
And then we’ll have some pretty cool stuff coming out after that.
Supplemental: I received this from The Planet’s sales rep: An additional 1 gig of ram will cost an additiona $25 per month, thus the price of the server per month is going to be $185.
Shane’s Appandage: The new server is online. I am currenly configurating it, and awaiting for ThePlanet, to format the old apollo server to rename it to athena. They will be dropping the athena server within a few hours.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Drifting Debris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sweet! Sounds good. If the SQL box lasts a bit over a year we will have gotten our money’s worth out of the RAM purchase. And who knows where we’ll be at in a year.
(Please don’t cue any “One year later…” chirons.)
I’ve always hated the hosting companies that charge you by the month for things like extra ram sticks. I mean an extra gig of ram costs under $100 today, so if you are going to rent it $25 is way too high. At the same time they burned you, it seems when they let you buy the ram last time, so you can’t win.
I’ve been looking for new hosting myself. It would be cool if somebody developed mediawiki to run on multiple servers, because then you could do something like run it on Amazon EC3. Keeping a single EC3 running is $72 per month, plus bandwidth (20 cents/gigabyte) which is pretty decent. But the kicker is you can dynamically add as many similar servers as you want when you need it.
Thus if you could do this, you could run on one low power server for the rest of 2007. And you could have 10 or even 100 servers running for the 24 hours after the show airs, for fast response, th en tone it back down to 1 for the rest of the week.
If mysql is your bottleneck, there are people who have worked to parallize that but rumour has it that Amazon will shortly release a plugin for their S3 storage service to look like mysql, which would be fabulous — use their database to store everything, and just bring up extra servers on demand to run the wiki code and do queries to the super powered sql engine!
To add to that, let me give you some advice I should have thought of earlier, and which is probably too late. Don’t buy any more hosting today! The wiki performance will be fine as is — probably even better with your upgrades to apache and squid — until the special movie airs. Traffic is going to be light until then.
Hosting always gets cheaper, every month. And things like EC2 and S3 (typo above, it’s not EC3) will also get better and may well support mysql and mediawiki by the time you need it.
Never buy computing stuff until you need it, it’s always cheaper and better, later.
Hope this reaches you in time.
Joe… we have to get the IP switched around so the new server is the current IPs and apollo/athena server will be the other set of IPs.
You got the new data in the databases right? Before they take Athena offline?!
Have you thought about just renting some space at a shared data centre and an up link.
And just build your own hardware?
I’m sure it’d save money in the long run.
But than again, you’d need to actually be near the data centre.
Let me add some more notes (probably too late, and your spam filter rejected them when I posted earlier.)
You won’t need capacity on the wiki until the 2-part movie comes out, and after that not until season 4. It will be fine with your software upgrades, so I retract my advice to go for it and suggest you not buy anything in computing until you need it. It’s always cheaper and faster if you get it later.
The support for mysql in amazon s3 might be a really exciting development, combined with the ability to use mediawiki on ec2 servers.
Recovered your comments Brad, sorry for the harsh spam filter. We were getting pretty hammered on the other Blog so I turned the filters up a bit high.
It’s not just the BSWiki that would benefit from these upgrades, however…
And, while it may be more appealing to build our own box, I don’t live near a data center so that’s a bit out of the question for us at this point.
As for Athena, the server won’t be taken down until I know everything will be all right.
For the IPs, I’ll update the ticket so that we can have them reassigned accordingly.
Renting the RAM is really expensive. 25$ a month. That’s a ripoff
Just buying it would be cheaper in the long run
While the rental price is steep, the purchase price is also high (~$250 on the server formerly known as Apollo), and apparently that “purchase” stays with the server. So if you upgrade systems you are out the money for the “permanent” RAM.
Nothing is written in stone, and we’ll definitely adapt as demand/load dictates.
We do appreciate the technical advice, and we maybe ought to think about having a permanent spot for soliciting/responding to such advice. Some people choose to contribute by making detailed lists of things in the wiki… we should let other people contribute their technical expertise (as it pertains to keeping the (little e) enterprise up and running).
Brad,
You never know what is in store.
Joe,
There wasn’t much activity on the DB.
Well, when it comes to trends in the price of hosting, yeah, I do have a very good idea what’s in store. I believe Joe’s ordered one upgrade, and I am going to guess that combined with software upgrades, the wiki will be able to handle the surge around the 2-part movie this fall.
Other than that, he should wait until December to buy anything more.
I’ve also noticed there are hosting companies that actually specialize in mediawiki. I don’t know how they do at performance, but it could be worth looking into, have people who tune mediawiki for a living do the hard part — that’s wise even if you are a skilled sysadmin.
“we maybe ought to think about having a permanent spot for soliciting/responding to such advice.”
BW:TA –> Battlestar Wiki:Technical Advice
How about that?
It will be on a more “general URL” but good idea Catrope.