Hey Fidel,

If you want, we can manage the server for you but instead of using Siteground, I would spawn a linode instance. Without any cpanel / whm installed, I am pretty sure that with $40 / month, you'll get a good deal.

The problem with Siteground is that, they do not allow root access for their managed plans and I have no idea what sort of optimizations done / performed by them.

Hi Mark,

I will need to speak with my dev to see if he is ok with this because we work together quite a bit in c panel as I am not too familiar with linode.

Having said that, how will this change the massive strain that easysocial is causing to a server? If I switch, will I be able to properly support 250 users online at one time or wil I still be crashing regularly? I am all for switching if the end result will be an improved experience for my users but with my big event this Sunday, and my current subscription on siteground paid up until November 27, I'm in a bit of a bind.

Thanks.

If it helps, my cpanel has hmu access etc

Hey Fidel,

Cpanel / WHM is known to hog CPU because they are actually running some process at the backend which you aren't aware of. I have managed another site before and moved from their dedicated server with Cpanel and WHM to a cloud instance. Before the move, the average server load was around 1.x to 2.x, but after moving over to the cloud instance with none of the cpanels involved, the server load was constantly around 0.xx

If you are interested in this, write to me at https://crm.stackideas.com/index.php to request for a quote and I will see what can be done to accommodate your requirements. We are also having thoughts of setting up our own cloud version which is managed by us. Since we know our scripts best, we know how to setup a more optimized environment for our customers

Exactly! Ditch Cpanel or Plesk and build your own stack! If you want a fast server learn command line and configure/install your own server!

We handle 600+ users online with 4 cores and 16gb of Ram, I would suggest more RAM then some clever ways of using it. Also what is crashing exactly? Is it the PHP or a massive amount of SQL queries? In both cases memory cache techniques will help handle way more users along with tuning.

I'm being told by siteground that too many sql queries are being made. I have upgraded to 6gb of ram but I fear it won't be enough. I'll talk to my dev about switching to linode which means I have a lot of research to do on my end in order to be able to also manage the server

Consider a full tune up of the SQL. This needs to be done every few days for site with large amounts of traffic. Also I would implement memcached which would cache many of your database calls and drastically reduce the CPU load. We also use Varnish to server all pages direct from memory to all non logged in traffic.

You can also make use of a CDN and with enough memory mount the entire Joomla cache folder to RAM. There are so many tricks! Of course the biggest trick is the original choice of web server. NGINX along with PHP-FPM will eat Apache for breakfast!

Running a lot of SQL queries does not mean that it hogs up more CPU / memory. Running lots / less complex queries however does affect the CPU / memory

We have done the performance tests our selves and running 200 simple queries with proper indexing on the table columns are much faster than running 1 complex query that fetches 200 records.

Tye last time I used memecached it broke my css styling and made users appear to be logged in as different users. I received over 200 messages from people panicking that they had been hacked because it appeared as if other people were on their accounts.

Amy tips on how to use caching features and not run into this issue?

Hi Fidel

If you are facing any load issues due to CometChat, you can simply consider subscribing to CometService at https://www.cometchat.com/cometservice. This will offload 95% of the work to our servers and keep the load on your servers low. Feel free to email us at support (at) cometchat.com if you need any further assistance.

Robert

Team CometChat

I already use comet service as well. I just upgraded to 7 cores and 6gb to try and stabilize the servers while I support the 160+ users that I'm hitting. Is there no way for someone to see what is going wrong on my server because of cpanel?

To be fair although to a certain extent it will help, throwing extra horse power at the situation will only go so far. BTW, what are they charging you for this? I only ask you this as you may be better of considering a true dedicated server solution. I can recommend some packages with Namecheap that we have used that have amazing performance for the money.

Correct configuration and optimization is the key. I would really consider a true dedicated solution running on SSD. You can then build the server from scratch choosing the operating system of your choice, web server and all cache options. I can help you and recommend a configuration as I do this for a living. It would take me about 30 mins to put together a custom stack which would support around 300 users online without breaking too much of a sweat. To put it in perspective for you we currently pay $169 a month for a dedicated solution (for a client) which we have installed and tuned and now supports over 500 logged in users while never breaking 30-40% cpu usage at peak. This means that we could in theory support a lot more users.

Memcached should not give you issues like that if configured and installed correctly. We generally use memcached to store all user sessions and cache as many database queries as possible. It works great! To be honest the best and fastest method for directly caching Joomla is to use the file option within the Joomla configuration and then mount the entire cache folder directly to the memory of the server.

Thanks for sharing this Matthew

Thanks for all the feedback guys. How much will it cost to have someone look at my code and then set me up on a custom server? My dev would be willing to work on it as well and I would just need to learn about command line server management. I need to make the switch end of november.

I'm certainly not trying to tout for business, but I can give you a reasonable quote for professional install, server side set-up and tune.

Ok I'll keep that in mind. I think mark said that stack ideas aLao has some solutions available.

This community is the best.

We don't always do this but if you want, you could reach us at https://crm.stackideas.com to request for a quote