Dedicated servers

[devknob]

I'm looking for dedicated servers for the first time for a video sharing site and im totally lost. Some dedicated hosting I've found has widely varied in price. The managed solutions I've looked at (and im pretty sure I need managed, cause I know nothing about servers and dont have the time to learn it) are theplanet, rackspace and inetu.

 

Somethings still elude me like, if I am approaching the breaking point in load on my server, is this going to effect quality or completion of serverside video encoding? Is there a simple way to avoid this with a script if it does happen? Do I need 2 servers, one for encoding, and one for serving, if so what stats should the different servers have? I've read that serverside encoding can be somewhat processor intensive, so what kind of processor would be ideal for serverside video encoding? Is the firewall these services offer absolutely necessary for to be secure, or is there an alternative that could offer the same level of security?

 

I don't have a huge budget, so there isnt alot of room for mistakes in this department.

Whats your take? What have you used for what kind of hosting and is it managed, what do you recommend?

 

 

[roopurt18]

I think you may be able to squeak by with a single dedicated server at first.

 

I think I'd set it up so that only a single video is being encoded at a time, which should leave enough processor left over to run Apache.  I think you can get by with this until the site starts to take off.

 

You definitely need to learn how to monitor your systems resources and probably get a time log of the resources throughout the day so you can decide what is the average load, what is the peak, etc.

 

As you approach 60 - 80% of your server's capacity you will start to need to look into extra servers.  At that point I would move the encoding process off of the main web-server onto more powerful servers.  You will also want to eliminate the restriction of having only one video file being encoded at a time or your users will turn away.

 

I know that many of the current video sharing sites out there use many servers just to store and serve the video files, usually as sub-domains of the main site.

 

Also, you forgot to add Server Powered to the list of dedicated hosts that manage your server; they also host this site.