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Requirements for server that will serve large static content?
A friend of mine is an avid photographer, not quite a professional but gets many requests. He does many events and shoots video quite a bit. He wants to be able to host a gallery and allow his "clients" to download the touched up full-size photos and videos that he shoots. These can range from 4MB to 500MB for the videos.
Now I was thinking of just getting the new Kimsufi mks 2G for him, since it has 500GB storage 5TB bw and is incredibly cheap. The only thing I'm not sure of is the CPU and amount of RAM. He and I are expecting to get a lot of traffic from people in bursts (after each event), so could an ATOM proc and 2GB of ram handle the load?
For serving this kind of content which is most important or what are some minimums?
Thanks
Comments
Yes, it'll be fine. Cache whatever image gallery you use, some php caches (such as APC) and memcache (since you have 2Gigs of ram) would be sweet.
for static content, try using nginx, it can serve a lot of static content with small RAM and CPU usage
then combine with cloudflare
Thanks for the quick replies. I was planning on setting up a LNMP stack on whichever server.
@Wintereise I'll be sure to check out memcache with nginx.
As an additional question... how many connections could this setup actually serve before bottlenecking? And which would be first to bottleneck (CPU / HDD IO ?)
I'm sure intel atom more than enough to handle this.
but, how large is in serve large static content
Nginx is a must.
You didn't mention where your friend lives, but geographic location is something to keep in mind here. If he's in the US, then a Kimsufi may not be a good idea (unless they expanded the Kimsufi line to the Canada DC and I didn't notice).
if you are on 100Mbps Network i think your network will be first bottleneck
Depends on what you run. If large php functions and mysql, disk and cpu. If static files depends on the HD, but most likely the network.
Get some kind of "cloud" solution
It keeps his costs in control, he knows how much x amount of gb (bandwidth and space) is and OP may think he can handle such a site but when SHTF, paying a few bucks each month to a cloud provider where you run the slider over to get more disk space would be a "can sleep at night" solution versus "did the KS box just go down??"
amazon s3?
A kimisufi 2g would be capable of handling the load. If you can however, put the photo's on flickr or something and let them handle the files. But please do NGINX, it is awesome.
@NickM
Well my friend is in North America. I know the connectivity with OVH (RBX) isn't the best, but for at least downloading the videos I was thinking a dedicated line would be best. It would just take more # of connections to max out the users speed.
@Mun
I plan to use the kimsufi MKS2G for serving static content only. I'd probably host his website on one of the vps's I own.
As long as the network is first to saturate I'm fine.
@bamn
I was thinking cloud solution, but the more bandwidth intensive the costs skyrocket to unreasonable prices. I know the benefits of offloading css and basic images of a site to cloud but for large file serving I don't know if the cost warrants any of the benefits?
Due to the nature of the size of files and amount of people. If I say 1TB transferred minimum per month. How would that equate in a cloud scenario like Amazon S3?
I've never dealt with them, but using their calculator it says 50GB of storage and 1TB transfer out is 125$/month.
I'm probably not doing the calculation right.
Because for the same price I could order 10x mks2g and have 500GB storage (rsyncing across all 10 servers) and 50TB out transfer and essentially 1Gbit bw? (Which is way more than I'd ever need)
Thank you all for your responses they have been extremely helpful.
(I realize the importance of NGINX!)
I've thought really big numbers before in reference to clients but unfortunately, until you get a month of real traffic or if he had an existing site, you may be surprised.
My scenario: I have a client who has about 10GB of high resolution photos for his company and services, since it's detail oriented. He uses probably less than 1GB of data transfer per month on a cPanel server.
Would you suggest any other CDN's other than Amazon's S3?
He hasn't had a site like this before, but it is good to know for photos they probably won't use as much data as I thought.
My only concern is he does have video's ranging from 150-500MB. If only 5 people download the 500MB video that's already 2.5GB. Its just a concern for the younger generation who prefer to download than distribute a CD/DVD. Especially at some of the wedding events he shoots.
Again thanks, I'll test it out on one of my LEB's for a month or two to get an idea of the traffic and bandwidth consumption.
Reverse Proxy with SQUID cache !
Use CloudFlare on top of the kimsufi with nginx than you'll be good to go. You connection around the world can't be that bad with CloudFlare
GWAN.
Make good use of 'expires' for repeat visitors. The fastest connection is between a web browser and its cache, and every visitor has lots of disk space....
I don't know anyone that actually uses GWAN. All the reviews of it look like paid ads, since there is nothing bad said about it. So tell me why would you point me to GWAN when I was asking about server requirements. Nginx is open source and readily used all over the web.
@sleddog
Thanks for the good tip, very useful!