June 18, 2010 @ 6:34 am If you are seeing this blog post, that shows you are now landing on the new VPS that hosts this blog. Yes, Low End Box has moved again, one month since moving from VPSLink to 2HOST. This time to QuickWeb (or their soon-to-be-launched subsidiary MicroVPS) in Dallas TX with Softlayer.
Nothing wrong with 2HOST though — it runs perfectly fine. Stable. Fast. But there is one problem — it’s not low end enough. I mean, c’mon 512MB to run a WordPress blog? I might be able to excuse myself if I am running TechCrunch but for Low End Box I think it needs to run on something low-end. Not just in term of price, but also in spec.
So Joe from QuickWeb lent me this Xen VPS in Dallas with the following spec
- 80MB memory/128MB swap
- 5GB storage
- 1TB/month data transfer
- Xen
- Debian 5 Lenny 32bit
So far so good. I am getting one single core of Xeon X3460 @ 2.8GHz. Let’s see how it stands running Low End Box :) Software loaded so far
- Nginx + PHP/FastCGI (1 process) + MySQL
- syslog + cron + xinetd + exim4 + sshd
X3460 is fast enough, and the performance should be on part with 2HOST if the PHP process does not get paged out. I am also running a cron job checking up on providers every now and then to make sure they don’t get included in our monthly dead pool. That’s coded in Python + SQLite and should take ~5MB RSS when its running.
Well, a post that has technical info in it! Cool, I was starting to think you’re just gonna be posting new and new offers and stuff, that’d suck. Remember, people who read your blog are the ‘low end’ kind of guys – we want to hear how to squeze 2 more kilobytes from lighty or mysql!
great job Admin! lowendbox really lived in its name and doing what it is preaching… to educate people that it is not “always” about big RAM that can make VPS useful! a micro VPS at the hands of knowledgeable web admin and hosted by descent provider can be very useful and can save you a lot of money :)
@Zlayer, yeah i’m sure most reader would be interested to hear how to accomplish this kind of stuffs from the admin of lowendbox ^^
Admin,
It would be awesome if you post your techniques as well. It’s really cool you run WP on 80MB Ram :)
Btw, you can’t go wrong with Quickweb. they are amazing!
80MB for a xen vps is enough to run ngnix or lighttpd. But not for apache2. The min. spec is 128 MB there. That would be better.
Hey, if you’re not using that 2Host VPS anymore, I’d be interested in taking it over ;D
@Zlayer — well I sorted expecting the readers here *already* know how to configure Nginx, and low-memory MySQL and do not need much guide line. In fact if you google those they are pretty much everywhere.
@Alex — well for Apache2 worker-MPM + PHP on mod_fcgi it is still possible. Back in the days (cough cough) I used to run Apache with Perl CGI dynamic pages on a 486 DX4-75 with 8MB! How things have changed…
@InsDel — sorry it is still used by something else. A low traffic WP site like Low End Box is actually not very resource heavy, but other things are.
@flyah — It’s actually pretty easy thus I’ve never bothered with a post :P
What I normally do:
apt-get install nginx php5-cgi php5-mysql mysql5-server/usr/bin/php5-cgi -b /var/run/php.sock. The trick here is NOT to usePHP_FCGI_CHILDRENso the master process is handling the requests itself.I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3 (which is too heavy for my liking), and mysqld is hovering at 10MB RSS and php-cgi at around 20MB.
I linke QuickWeb!
I have a QuickWeb Xen VPS for 3+ months as a primary Nagios+munin+rsyslog monitoring server. Fast & rock-solid stable.
I updated mine to WP3 as well. It does seems a little speedier for me. Haven’t been monitoring the resources usage much though.
I have had an OpenVZ VPS with QuickWeb for about 3 weeks now and do not have any complaints.
Admin,
Thanks a lot for the guide. :) I will test it out on my QW VPS later :)
Many thanks Admin for great guide!
If you can put some hint please, changing VPS is also require to move the data, ho you manage that.
Thanks Admin for sharing all those good stuffs.
Hello, admin
For your great site lowendobx, it running with wordpress and maybe more then 30K pv. Could you tell me how much of you server load on the quickweb vps when the vistors was high. will it more then 3 or 5? thanks.
forum says it’s still hosted w/ vpslink, is it?
quickweb’s awesome! very good choice. :)
@Marl — fixed. Thanks for pointing that out.
@vpsbeta — LowEndBox is currently around 70k pv/month, and the loadavg is mostly under 0.1 (which has always been in the case on VPSLink, 2HOST and now QuickWeb).
@melf — it’s all about planning :)
$ ssh oldserver tar jcf - /var/www/lowendbox | \ tar jvpf - -C /$ ssh oldserver mysqladump lowendbox \| gzip -c | \ gzip -c | mysql lowendboxNote that in my main nginx.conf, I have
include /var/www/*/nginx.confso each of my site directory is self-contained including the Nginx configuration. The above can also be automated with scripts — which is useful when you do this kind of thing pretty often :)Nice Tips :)
Admin: Are you using spawn-fcgi or PHP-FPM?
@KLIKLI — PHP CGI supports FastCGI by itself and there is no need for spawn-fcgi or PHP-FPM. I just run
/usr/bin/php5-cgi -b /var/run/php.sockand wrap it into a init script so it can start/stop and has a pid file.Oh… sorry for my ignorant
Hi admin,
Can you write full tutorial to run popular blog (as LEB) with Nginx like this post : http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/
Many thanks!
dear admin,
can you teach me how to optimize your VPS? i think run WP at 80 MB RAM is awesome :)
@indoc0der
He already write about VPS optimization somewhere in this blog. You can even run WP at 64MB RAM
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/
Hello admin, do you have DDOS protection on this node?
Nope.