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michaeltk26

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How Much Juice Do I Need?

I'll explain my needs, and hopefully someone can tell me what kind of configuration I will need.

I am designing a web page in PHP (LAMP configuration) that will allow 12 separate retailers to store their entire inventories online.  Each retailer will use the site to check out customers at each transaction.  These are hobby stores, and I estimate that each inventory will have about 300-500 items.  In addition, each retailer will do about 10-20 transactions (like checking out a customer) per hour.  Sometimes, though, a retailer might want to browse/sort his entire inventory and to do reports on the entire inventory.

One VERY important note:  Every single transaction is done over SSL.

I know that this is a difficult question to answer, but could someone give me a vague idea of how much computing power I will need?   Right now I do not have a dedicated server.  Instead, I am running in a virtual server environment provided by olm.net.  Please go to www.olm.net and look at their lowest-priced VPS plan.  That's what I have.

One more question:  Now let's change the assumptions and assume that I am going to have 50 retailers instead of 12.  Now what kind of configuration will I need?

I know that it's difficult to be specific.  Really I'm just looking for general ideas at this point.  I'm assigning 500 points to this question because it is quite urgent in timeframe.

Thanks in advance for the advice!
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cracky

The e-vpsvalue looks like it would handle the traffic you speak of comfortably. I would not expect huge traffic initially. The beauty of these plans is that it's really easy to add resources in an instant. They simply allocate you more RAM as needed.

Obviously, 50 retailers would need more resources.

Remember that it's not really the number of sites / databases that affect your server performance, but the amount of traffic ... and that's nearly impossible to estimate.

I say go with the cheapest VPS plan as you already have and simply upgrade as needed. Just make sure you bill your clients for usage and explain that if they use more resources, they will need to pay more. If they are getting huge traffic, this will usually equate to more sales, so they won't mind.
Hello,

Well.... your question speaks to 'Server Capacity Planning' and depending upon how you approach this subject, this could be a very complex, detailed and resource intensive task. ( Some mid-sized companies that I have consulted for have created complete development environments with real servers with varrying hardware configs, to test simulated transactions and measured loads, so that the data and performance of these varrying configs can be evaluated to select the proper hardware for the required conditions.)

However, you could also use some capacity planning and simulation software from vendors such as Microsoft and use virtual simulators to generate some test data or you could do some review of published white papers concerning server capacity planning that shows the results of sometimes very exhaustive reseacrh efforts of companies that have set out to solve a problem or design a solution to a current server need.

In a recent deployment of a MS server 2003 Terminal server environment with remoter users spread accross multiple states, we were very concerned about capacity planning, initial hardware configs and scability of the server config that we were going to build for our customer. Instead of relenting to the time intensive requirements of setting up a demo and test environment, researched several published white papers and documentation, white papers and case studies from Microsoft and other MFG's that gave us solid information to proceed with a now very successful TS deployment that was within budget and gave us head room for futuer scalability.

Your environment is a simple webservices front end driving a data source for querried inputs. You should determine what DB you are going to use and then study the published white papers such as this one for capacity planning of a MS SQL server. http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/tech_papers/A_Case_for_Capacity_Planning.pdf

Typically, an SQL server performs best with a RAID 5 array for the data, you can find very inexpensive, enterprise class Xeon based servers all over the place, (like this one on Ebay... we have now deployed 6 of these servers in production SQL server farms and they perform very reliably..http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=56103&item=5772033569&rd=1 )

You need to have a very reliable server to provide adequate SLA's (service level agreements) to your customer base and a high performance internet connection. My suggestion is to buy 1 or 2 of this type of xeon servers colocate them in a facillity close by and you are off to the races to profits....

Good Luck!
Brian
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ASKER

Okay, I appreciate the information about how it is very difficult to estimate server needs.  But let me ask you this: if you were running a webserver application like I described in my initial post, would you choose a VPS plan to get started, or would you start out on a virtual server?
Sorry, my last question should have read " . . . or would you start out on a *dedicated* server."

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humeniuk
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Thank you to all for contributing.  I guess there is no clearly right or wrong answer here.  I conclude that I will stick with my VPS plan for now, but that I will be prepared to upgrade to a dedicated server at a moment's notice.  I think I could make the upgrade in 24 hours if I needed to do so.

Thank you again.  I do appreciate your advice.
You're welcome Michael, good luck with your project :)
Good luck michaeltk26 and thanks for the A.