Colo a NoGo

Well, looks like colo.the-bob.org in its current iteration will not be tenable for hosting.

Unbeknownst to me when I signed the hosting contract was the unspoken fact that our internet connection would be rate limited to 256k/sec. This caused some extreme slowness when accessing sites hosted on colo that I had moved over a weeks time.

My first inkling that something was not right was inbound bandwidth dropped from 3meg/sec to about 640k/sec. A big difference but not problematic, however that was incoming bandwidth which was what I was seeing transferring site data to the server.

What visitors were seeing on the internet was vastly different. This 256k/sec limitation effectively choked the server up so accessing any of the sites was extremely slow. I should say the code portion of the site loaded fine, but images were downloading like you were on a 56k modem. And if I tried to download a file from the server, it was coming down at a paltry 4k/sec.

I discussed this with the host and learned about this rate limitation. They raised it from 256k/sec to 512k/sec but it literally made no difference. I installed ntop on new.the-bob.org to see what kind of bandwidth could be expected only to discover that we routinely do about 700 Kbits/sec bursting to 7 Mbits/sec.

So the bandwidth offerings of the colo host were not going to be any good.

They kindly offered to let me out of the contract (which is great because otherwise I’d have to pay 90% of the 12 monthly payments).

I am moving the people back to new.the-bob for the time being, and DNS has already been put back there as well.

In looking around the internet for possibly a dual-core dedicated server to lease, I discovered that ServerPronto where the-bob.org is hosted has a partner site ColoPronto that offers colocation at dirt cheap rates including 1U for 29.95! Unbelievable.

I have inquired with them as to any bandwidth limitations and if all sounds good, I will see about shipping the server out to them.

Regardless, i think any slowness problems with the-bob.org or new.the-bob.org have to do with the single-core celeron processors that they’re running. Colo is much faster because while it is only a single processor, it is hyperthreaded so Ubuntu Server sees 2 cores and schedules threads across them. So a hefty MySQL query doesn’t hang up the server and make apache and other processes wait for processing time.

If ColoPronto doesn’t work out and colo never finds a home, hopefully I can find an affordable dual-core server which should last us a number of years.

the-bob.org at ServerPronto went live on the internet in 2003 I think, so it’s been a good ride with them but that box is a celeron with 512mb ram and its time is up.

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