Google know best March 24, 2008

Some categories: hosting. Some tags: , , . And exactly no rambling responses.

For our next project/idea, we need a server; our own, magnificent computer all for ourselves to play with. No more shared hosting: finally free! Strictly not true because our next project is based upon shared hosting. While looking around hosts, I discovered many of them (most, in fact) boast about their “8 core beasts” with “4GB’s” of RAM. Well, that’s great, but surely that means they just stick more accounts on the server? Resulting in the same performance to a low-end server?

This is where we follow Google’s policy and not the standard policy followed by everyone else. Google use low end servers, core2duos with 2GB’s of RAM, but they have them en mass. Thousands and thousands of them. OK, great, so we are going to use lower-end servers, and simply have less clients on each server, whoop-de-do. But, there are some distinct advantages for everyone:

  1. Less accounts per server means less chance of someone building a bad php loop or other rogue script and slowing the server down
  2. Most dedicated servers are connected on a 100Mbit pipe to the internet, with less accounts, the less accounts there are sharing the 100Mbit pipe, increasing the speed of each account
  3. These days providers sell servers with (normally around) 2TB bandwidth, no matter what spec the server is; this means it’s more bandwidth-efficient for us to have low-end servers en masse
  4. Google are never wrong, as we can see, their site loads pretty quickly (instantly actually)

So there you have it, I rest my case: low end servers en-masse beats a few high end servers. Period.

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