Shared Dedicted Server Cooperative Feasibility Study

I'll start off by saying that my knowledge of web servers is severely limited, so expert opinion in this thread is welcomed. 

The purpose of this thread is to outline a shared server environment that could offers resources that are better in some key areas, that would normally be too costly for sites without a robust revenue stream.  Normally when people speak of a shared, they  are referring to a server that hosts dozens of website on a single server, and resources can become quickly limited.  These servers are really only good for developing a site, and soon something with a little more power is needed.

The way I see it, Dolphin sites can quickly become media intensive, with photos and videos.  A server environment capable of rapidly delivering content is what is needed in these cases.  The average, run of the mill dedicated server, in the $100/month price range likely comes with a 10Mbps connection to the internet.  If you're lucky, you'll get a 100Mbps connection, but from what I've seen, those with a 100Mbps connection are at the upper end of the price range.  A 1000Mbps connection will add about another $200 per month to the cost.  A 10Gbps connection will add around $400 per month. It's really easy to get to the $1000 per month price point.

I'm pretty sure $1000 per month is a little out of most people reach.  But what if you could have a $1000 a month server environment for a fraction of the cost?  What if a limited number of people shared a really jacked up server?  Let's have a look at a setup from this provider:

http://fdcservers.net/dedicated_servers.php

Let's select their most expensive dedicated server plan, a Dual Opteron 6272 (2 x 16 cores, 32 cores total)  It comes with 64GB of RAM, and 4 x 1.5 TB HDDs.  The base price with a 10Mbps connection is $449/month..... already out of most people's price range.  Then let's do some upgrades. Add hardware RAID: $85/month.   Upgrade all HDDs to 2TB: $20/month.   Upgrade the connection speed to 10 Gbps: $350/month.

Total Price: $904/month .... who can afford that?

12 people can afford that.  Split 12 ways, the monthly cost is about $75 per month.  For that price, your share of RAM is about 5GB.  Per 2TB HDD, your share is about 167GB.  The really big news is that 12 sites will share a 10 GBps connection to the internet, and that's a huge performance boost in delivering media content to client computers. 

I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a hosting plan out there, that can deliver this kind of resources for $75 a month. 

First, I'd like some input from people that know more about server environments than me (That would be just about anybody).  How would 10 reasonably busy Dolphin site run on this server?  Would they run better than on a cloud environment in the same price range?   One thing that no other plan can improve on for the price, is that 10Gbps connection for content delivery.... that I am sure of.

For this situation to work, you'd first need 12 people committed to using it.  No messing around with monthely payments... I'd suggest 6 month payment intervals... that's a $450 semi-annual payment.    The server would need a manager..... perhaps a 13th person given a free account on the server for managing it.  In this scenario, I believe all users should reside in the US.  Someone will need to act in a fiduciary capacity to see that payments are made on time to the data center..... this is an extremely important position, and needs to be 100% reliable.  The 12 people making 6 month payments, give the plan a built in fail-safe as far as payments, in case sh't happens and someone suddenly stops payments.  Any two payments collected will pay for the server for 30 days, which should be time enough to resolve the issue.

OK.... opinions please

I'm even less server savvy than you HL, but it does make very good sense to me. Frick, I was paying $450pm for a HFW managed dedicated server. problem was their interpritation od "managed". Hence I no longer have that server.

I am looking for an alternative but unfortunately I am outside the US..... Unless there are enough of us in the UK to go the same route? I am sure with a little help with things such as migration I would be fine. I would also be willing to stump up every 6 months.

I will watch this with interest : )

Check my new server out tomorrow fella (its in that price bracket) :) am just going to start a post for recommendations 

 RE:

 So...... tell me how your post contributes to this topic?

Spend some money build a 1u server yourself,  find a hosting company send your server and only pay for the bandwidth you can't beat that!

 RE:

 You still have to pay the connectivity charge for a 10Gbps connection which is $350/month.... probably more for co-location.  Then if you have a hardware problem, you're screwed.  There is a certain peace of mind that comes with a rented server, that is worth the cost. 

While the stats are impressive,  I don't think this is feasible or worthwhile endeavor due to the management headache and lack of true requirement for this kind of machine (even shared).

What would you propose the OS to be, and would it be shared? Personally I would not be comfortable with this type of arrangement, simply due to the fact that all 12/13 hosted websites are at the wrath of a single server OS & admin.

Might be better suited if it ran some sort of hypervisor, thereby enabling each party their own VPS with dedicated resources. Their own OS, their own patching etc. What they do on their box wont affect anyone else's. Problem with this, is you're looking at more cost for any hypervisor worth a damn.

I also question the storage capabilities. Large capacity disk is typically slow, and in this case probably 7200rpm or less. Even in a Raid 1+0, I think a couple of busy mysql DBs will bring them to their knees. To help counter this, I'd want at least a battery backed write cache on the controller, which from a quick look I don't think this company offers. SSD would be an excellent choice for DB performance, but now you suffer from MLC vs SLC disk. Their low prices indicate its likely MLC, so a decent amount of read/write will cause premature failure. SLC does not come cheap :(.

10Gbe is also a bit overkill I'd think. Their plan doesn't indicate if the server includes a 10Gb adapter, it's probably 1Gb at best, which couldn't even begin to take advantage of the available backbone. Honestly, I have yet to see even a 1Gb link get saturated in a true production environment (enterprise class, not dolphin related)

Again, the implied & non-shared resources between each stakeholder are outstanding... but how many Dolphin admins need that type of horsepower? For those that do, you could argue that they'd consume a great deal of those resources if it wasn't tuned properly, or might quickly outgrow their carved out share and have to move on. 

What type of warranty & SLA do they offer against the hardware?

Not trying to shoot down the entire idea, just proposing what I think would be some of the most critical decision points.

Might as well also order a license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and have their support available.

I would be down for this. That is if i had money.

Lately i have barely managed to scrape the money together to buy a .99 cent roll of Scott tissue to wipe my arse with.

Sorry. I would normally jump at a chance on a server with this much power. But right now i am living off the generosity of others until i get back on my feet. Which i hope will not be much longer.

I am not really sure if you can find 12 people that trust each other enough to share a single server.

Back in my day, this was the norm. One person ran a server, others had websites on it. All server config was handled by one person. Not done that way anymore. So i am not sure how well this will work for most people spoiled by cpanel.

@shnelson

Lack of a true requirement?  What are you basing that statement on?

The idea here, is to create a server environment that can handle media rich sites.... like Dolphin sites with a lot of photos and videos.  If you had 10 reasonably busy Dolphin sites, I don't think 2000 users online at the same time is to far fetched.   People on social networks spend a lot of time looking at photos and videos. Serving those up to 2000 client computers with a 6mbps connection, adds up to  12Gbps.   That's a pretty crude example, but I just use it to convey how instantaneous bandwidth can add up in a hurry.  The faster your connection speed, the better for multimedia content delivery. 

CPU always becomes the bottleneck with dolphin. :(

But i think this is a very good idea to share a server.  As shnelson said a hypervisor can be used to give all users their own powerful VPS with root access. They can do whatever they want but using a single OS for all sounds better for server instead of VPS.

 as there will be a few dolphin sites hosted on it as that is what this post is about or have i completely misread the post

 RE:

 I don't know if you misread it, but you certainly did not comprehend its intent.

To All: I respectfully request that you try to keep comments on topic.

Show me a dozen Dolphin websites that have 200 truly concurrent connections, hell, I'll even settle for a couple.  They are out there, but I'd argue that not all 200 are watching a video or clicking through photos in a frenzy unless you run a porn site.

Of the sites that are out there, I'd be willing to bet that they've got a reasonable hosting solution already secured and wont want to move over to something like this, with so many uncertainties.

Don't get me wrong, I love the thought of a wide open 10Gb pipe, but don't see that type of bandwidth ever being truly utilized by a bunch of pipe dreams. Your service provider will love you for it too, because they know you'll never use it and can start to oversubscribe and still rake in the money.

I suppose when you look at it in the grand scheme of things, that 10Gb is only costing $30 per person per month - I just don't like paying for things I don't need. I'm finally creeping up to 10k unique visitors per month, which might equate to half a dozen or more concurrent logged in users. I still only burned up 26.4GB of outgoing bandwidth - with 2,592,000 seconds in a month, it comes down to about 10.447 KBps or 83.58Kbps average.

If my traffic increased 20 times over, putting me at 100 concurrent users, I'd still only be bordering the use of 1-2Mpbs.

I think 1Gbps is more than plenty for a combined effort such as this, especially to start. The ability to burst is key.

If you're anticipating a lot of live streaming and the use of RMS, you could burn up a lot more bandwidth.. but I think individual container performance will suffer first.

It all depends on how you define your requirements.  My personal requirement, is that I am in this for the long haul, and would like to be in a server environment that I can stick with for a long time.  I am working on 4 different websites.  Two of them will offer a lot of multimedia content including HD videos.   One will have a lot of downloadable files.  One has a to of flash games, and you'd be surprised how fast BW adds up when you're serving up flash games.

The reason I picked a 10GBps connection in the example I cited, is because the incremental cost between 1GBps and 10GBps was only $150 per month, and split 12 ways, that only adds $12.50/month ($30 incremental cost Vs a 100MBps connection).  A 100MBps connection simply isn't adequate for a dozen sites, so that option is ruled out.  If you can eliminate a potential bottleneck for $30 a month, I believe it's a good investment.   If it makes the difference between a clients HD video playing immediately, or the client watching an hourglass while the video buffers, it's worth it.

sounds good, kinda like a super VPS...

but....

in case of a regular VPS, while you are most likely to be sharing with lots of others (30-50 other users!), I would bet most are not that serious websites, or not going to be huge consumers of resources (although you just dont know).

But, with a Dolphin only VPS, you know you will have a min of 10 sites if split between 10 users, that will all be heavy on resources. 

What if they all did get busy and at the same time? 

Could be a massive drain on resources even with the high spec server...

Also, I would bet that anyone who goes the dedicated route is a half serious dolphin user who will prob want to develop a number of sites. If each person had separate cpanel login (would need this for ease of use and safety / privacy) then how can you know or stop some users from creating more than 1 dolphin site on their share of the server? If half the users have 3 sites, then you could be 50% down on your resources already as a single site user...

Just thinking it out, not trying to throw a big spanner in the works as it sounds like a great idea!

 RE:

A shared server situation like this, is a business arrangement, and as such, you would need a set of agreed upon conditions and contingencies that everyone would have to sign off on.... the most important one being, only ONE web site per account.  For this reason, all users would need to reside in the same jurisdiction.  Some types of sites would need to be ruled out.  I have no desire to share a server with porn site wannabes, teen chat sites, or any type of huge file repository.  I think the arrangement would be best for business oriented sites.

 counts me out i guess

We'll put the bandwidth to rest, you make a good enough point for 10Gb. Just keeping in mind that the cost for that pipe is more than I pay for a half dozen VPS servers (not all d7).

Depending on your hypervizor, you can allocate dedicated resources per VPS or container. At that point I wouldn't care if someone hosted one site or a dozen, they are not going to get more than their share of CPU/Memory.

Honestly,  I see this type of solution more feasible if stakeholders could host any number of sites within their container, making it cost effective to prove out certain projects or markets if they needed to.

Where you might run into trouble is fair share of bandwidth. I'm not certain of any application that would allow you to put a hard restriction on how much someone could use, unless you started looking into Parallels ($$$) or another host in a box type solution.

With a 10GBps connection, and unmetered BW, I don't think you would need to put a restriction on BW usage.  The biggest question in my mind is how well a Dual Opteron 6272 (2 x 16 cores, 32 cores total) will  handle a dozen dolphin sites.  I don't know that anyone has done any meaningful benchmarking of a Dolphin site's cpu requirements.  I need to do some reading on Opteron servers.

I wouldn't look at it that way.

I would look at the best way to divvy up 32 cores and 64gb of memory. Scrap 12, you would end up with 3 cores each & databases don't do well with an odd count. Maybe go all the way to 16 total members? 2 cores per person with 4gb of ram is still incredible horsepower. Also brings the price down to about $60 a head.

If you're running a proper hypervizor, each virtual machine (aka container or vps) has it's own set of defined resources, that no other machine can cause contention with unless you are over subscribed on processor cores or memory. Example - you decide to stand up 20 virtual machines with 2 cpus each and 4gb of memory. You're now over subscribed by 8 processor cores and 16gb of ram. In a calm scenario, this is typically fine, but once a few machines out of the bunch start to get busy, you'll get contention against the over subscribed resources and cause higher cpu latency and memory ballooning or swapping.

As long as your resources are not over-allocated, the entire server will not suffer if one VM starts consuming all available resources. Instead, just that VM suffers, because the hypervizor will not let it borrow resources from the other VMs unless you tell it to.

So the real question - how well does a dual core server with 4GB of ram and slower disk benchmark against a busy Dolphin server? Will your members find themselves starved for resources, and do you keep any on reserve to allocate for an addition fee if needed (my vote: yes!). 

My professional career is in enterprise server virtualization and private cloud management, I work with these scenarios day in and day out and would be completely comfortable with what I recommend above in a production environment. 

You could take it a step further and start looking at High Availability between two physical servers, but then you'd be looking at an entirely new ballpark for associated costs.

Another recommendation I'd have - whoever this 'gatekeeper' server admin is, you should pre-negotiate up front a nominal fee for their time to manage the billing and server details that comes out of everyone's contributions. I think this is a safe route to take in the situation you need to replace said admin - you would have dedicated funds to hire out a new resource. 

Additional thought after re-reading my post...

Keep it at 12 total slots/virtual machines with an initial 2 cores and 4gb of memory. Set the remaining cores and ram on reserve to be allocated if someone gets big enough to need those resources, of which they will have to pay an additional fee for that allocation.

This allows you to cater to some of the smaller proof of concept or borderline hobby (pipedream) sites at a reasonable cost and let them expand when they get bigger.

Some info on processors:

http://www.amd.com/us/products/server/processors/6000-series-platform/6200/Pages/6200-series-processors.aspx

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Opteron+6272

 oh its a quite good processor.

 RE

 Yes it is.  Just to put it into perspective, here's a side by side comparison of the AMD6172 server by Fdcservers.net  Vs the Intel E6600 server use in Hostforweb's cheapest dedicated server setup offered for Dolphin.  http://hostforweb.com/dedicated/index.php

The  E6600 HFW is clocked at 2.4 GHz.