Straight Answer Please... How Many Websites can my dedicated server handle?

[WebTrooper]

Hi All -

I've been trying to get a straight answer but it seems everybody says "As many as you want..." Then they go techie on me. I have a dedicated server from Server Beach:

AMD Athlon 2200 Processor
1GB Memory
1 x 80 GB Hard Drive
2000 GB Bandwidth - No Cogent

I'd like to split it into 1000 MB chunks for resell. Obviously I can't sell 160 of these because the OS, Bind, Apache and all that use some of the space. But let's say those items use 2000 MB (is that realistic?), that would cut the offerings to 140 500MB virtual hosting accounts. Now my guess is that would overload the machine. Am I right.

My question is, and I realize this is subject to personal opinion, How many hosting accounts can I put on this server and still honestly claim to provide quality service?

Thanks!

 

[Marty]

You are not getting a straight answer, because there is no straight answer. How many sites you can put on a server depends on the nature of each site. I have two PIII servers, one has 160 sites that runs a load average over 1 most of the time and the other has 250 sites and runs a load average of around 0.5 most of the time. So you see, there is not set number of sites that a server can handle. It all depends on how much of a load each site exerts on the server. You basically need to watch server performance and stop adding accounts to that server when the performance deteriorates. This is a problem with bulk reseller plans due to the fact that you don't know how many sites or resources each reseller may use, but this unpredictability is part of the game of managing a server. Nobody is going to give a single, definitive number for how many accounts it will handle because that number does not exist. On the extremes, there are single sites that your server could not handle even if that was the only account there, and at the other end, it could handle almost an infinite number of single page sites that get absolutely know visitors at all.

 

[richy]

We've got several dedicated servers with extremely similiar specs. One has around 150 sites on it and another has over 1,100 sites on it. The latter one has still got "space to grow" whereas the 150 siter one is "pratically full" as it hosts quite busy sites running intensive scripts.

If it's simple static HTML sites you are hosting, you could fit many many thousands on a single server - but then again, a single database driven extremely dynamic site could easily overload a server...

 

[WebTrooper]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll just have to wing it. Mostly I want to avoid ever having to move live sites to another machine. As long as I don't overlap account quotas I should do okay.

 

[djmerlyn]

You should be able to figure out everything with a little math :D Don't go guessing...atleast math-out an estimate for yourself

 

[easyhoster1]

You should be able to figure out everything with a little math :D Don't go guessing...atleast math-out an estimate for yourself

Right, its not the number of sites.

Its the # = $ << Profit per server