Server outrages

[gd_barnes]

It's not the power supply so it's a more serious issue. It's now either the motherboard or CPU. This will probably take a while.

Ref: Outsourcing. I spend about $15/month/machine in electricity and less than that in upgrades and repair. I doubt that outsourcing can touch that, especially for only one machine, which is all that I'd be willing to outsource. The main justification would be for reliability but I'm not willing to spend the extra money at this point since I'm already spending about $180-200/month in electricity plus upgrades/repair on 11-12 machines.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by gd_barnes

Ref: Outsourcing. I spend about $15/month/machine in electricity and less than that in upgrades and repair. I doubt that outsourcing can touch that, especially for only one machine, which is all that I'd be willing to outsource.

You'd be wrong...

Try this handy calculator to see...

For public-facing "machines", outsourcing makes a lot of sense. Far more than a home's ADSL or Cable Modem in front of a machine without UPS backup....

[gd_barnes]

Originally Posted by chalsall

You'd be wrong...

Try this handy calculator to see...

For public-facing "machines", outsourcing makes a lot of sense. Far more than a home's ADSL or Cable Modem in front of a machine without UPS backup....

It's a little more...$30-40/month for running 3-4 instances but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. For a server machine, there would have to be an allowance for a dedicated IP and many GBs of transfer in-and-out per month. I'm not sure how that would calculate out. I didn't take any of that into account. The server machine gets a LOT of traffic!

Edit: I had a UPS backup that I thought was good and that I spent over $250 for. It only kept the server up for 20-30 mins. and then quit working after a couple of years. It turned out to be a piece of junk.

[gd_barnes]

The server is back up. All of the stores are closed here today so I swapped hard drives with one of my good Intel machines. I'm going to have to have a tech look at it. One known-good power supply and power chord did not work and I can't see any physical damage on the mobo.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by gd_barnes

It's a little more...$30-40/month for running 3-4 instances but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. For a server machine, there would have to be an allowance for a dedicated IP and many GBs of transfer in-and-out per month. I'm not sure how that would calculate out. I didn't take any of that into account. The server machine gets a LOT of traffic!

Every instance get's a dedicated "Elastic IP" for free while it's running.

Please define "a LOT of traffic".

[AMDave]

Originally Posted by chalsall

You'd be wrong...

Try this handy calculator to see...

For public-facing "machines", outsourcing makes a lot of sense. Far more than a home's ADSL or Cable Modem in front of a machine without UPS backup....

Nope. He'd be right.
Current bare-minimum requirement would be M1 Medium, 100% util, plus I/O, comes to close to $100 per month (excluding the CPU intensive processes that the server currently does in addition to port management and stats)
I suspect you underestimate how much work this machine actually does.

For kicks, I punched in some other requirements, split the db from the web server, requested dedicated CPU and a couple of other details and quickly passed $8000.00 per month. Not attractive when I can buy a machine and put it in a datacenter for 1 twelfth of the cost.

ed- it appears you are quoting pricing above for on-demand 'micro' instances. they are nice for little websites with little databases. They don't cut-it for this workload, storage volume or I/O. But thanks for making me check again:)

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by AMDave

I punched in some other requirements, split the db from the web server, requested dedicated CPU and a couple of other details and quickly passed $8000.00 per month. Not attractive when I can buy a machine and put it in a datacenter for 1 twelfth of the cost.

Here's a well known trick... Bid a little over the "spot" price for your instances....

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by AMDave

I suspect you underestimate how much work this machine actually does.

Possible.

I design "public facing" machines to be light-weight and disposable.

Apparently this is not the design in this case.

[AMDave]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Here's a well known trick... Bid a little over the "spot" price for your instances....

Interesting. I'll try that.

some other info re design:
15 databases (2 tables > 32 million rows)
102GB active files (additional on archive)
14 websites including file upload and download folders
plus a handy desktop for Gary when in need

Could it be done better?
yes. but relocating the port servers and stats database would not significantly change Gary's CPU or I/O demand. So while a machine is available it makes sense to maximise the use of the available resource.

[gd_barnes]

Wow, thanks Dave. I knew that machine did a lot but didn't know that it would cost that much to outsource it. Chalsall did have me thinking a little. It is such a hassle when there is a problem with the machine and I'm out of town for about a week every month and so can't quickly bring it back up if it goes down. It would be nice to avoid all of that.

I might have to do a little outsourcing during rallies in the future.

[AMDave]

It has got me thinking.
I will explore some tweaks and see what options there are to introduce a mirror for temporary fail-over on my server (where FDCPS currently lives: http://fdcps.no-ip.org/ )
If I can keep the incrementals small it may be doable more frequently than the full offsite backups that I'm doing fortnightly-ish, and I'd need to change a few things to expose the websites and ports etc.
That ought to keep me busy for at least several hours ;)
I'll get back to you.