VPS Hosting: HHD vs SSD vs RAM vs CPU, which is more important?

[rwsorensen]

Maybe this is my amateur question because I'm not a vps hosting provider, just using VPS for my websites, can you guide me which is the most important for a VPS : HHD or SSD or RAM or CPU?

 

[ElixantTechnology]

It all really depends on what you intend to utilize the system for. In the end the most important thing to look at is the RAM.

 

[astutium]

which is the most important for a VPS : HHD or SSD or RAM or CPU?

Is like asking which is more important on a car, the wheels or the engine - storage, ram, cpu, operating-system, management - they're all important.

How much you need of each, and whether VPS is the right technology, or a VDS is needed or a Dedicated Server or none of the above is very dependant on what your expectations and planned usage are.

 

[Hassan]

RAM is most important.

 

[freds86]

freds86

I agree with your though :clap: but can you let me know why you supposed that?

 

[TSOHost - Akin]

As you are using the VPS to host a few websites, RAM would be the most important (although I agree that they are all crucial).

The reason why RAM stands for me with regards to website hosting is that each user that sits on any of your sites will use a tiny portion of the RAM. This means that RAM directly affects how busy your sites can get.

Admittedly, CPU is extremely important for things such as the speed of the site etc however the CPU can spike above the number of available cores. RAM cannot and if the VPS runs out of memory ALL of your sites will go down.

 

[brentpresley]

RAM most important because it limits the amount of traffic you can handle, SSD is second most important because anything accessing storage will have to wait for storage requests to complete (i.e. the faster the better), CPU third most important (most modern CPUs are pretty darn fast, and even a single core can go pretty far), and HDD last.

We don't use HDDs in our Cloud offerings anymore at all because they are so slow.

 

[ElixantTechnology]

ElixantTechnology

This really does depend on what you are using the system for. If you're runing some pretty intense i/o requests, sure, SSD can be a pretty good idea, but you also got to remember the reliability of SSD drives are things are still pretty new on that front. The biggest concern with SSD is when the drives do crash, and they do they only have a certain lifespan, the information on them is un-recoverable just like on those SD cards you throw in you phone. Unles you're running your SSD setup in a Raid10 and monitoring them closely I don't think it's a good idea to jump in head first.

3Gbps SAS/iSCSI drives do still have a great advantage I find.

Most people are just jumping on the SSD bandwagon because it's new, it's cool and it's catchy. It's the new trend.

 

[brentpresley]

brentpresley

Sorry, but this is just completely wrong.

We have been using SSDs for 6 years now, 2 years in our public clouds, and the failure rate is less than 1/10th that of HDDs. This has allowed us to reduce our power usage by 35% throughout our datacenters, and hit performance levels that were simply not possible, even with VERY large SAN units.

There is no concern for data loss, because just like with HDDs no reliable hosting company is going to run a storage system without redundancy. We use RAID 0 locally for best performance, and RAIN 1 (Redundant Array of Independent NODES) for data resiliency on our clouds. Off-cloud backups are utilized for disaster recovery, of course.

Knock on wood, in 15 years of hosting, we have never lost any customer data.


I would never trust any provider not using SSDs. That to me simply tells me that that provider does not have a good understanding of how to design and implement a solid, reliable hardware setup.

 

[Nemanja]

Nemanja

Very informative. for a website with fast loading and stand more users online all the time, I should select RAM and CPUs first?

 

[brentpresley]

brentpresley

Yes, and for cost-effectiveness throw it behind a good CDN and you will be able to accommodate a large amount of traffic.

Anytime you have to hit the storage pool, even if it is SSD, you are going to lose some performance. Stay in RAM, and you are going to do much better.

 

[Nemanja]

Nemanja

I though to CDN but I visited some websites used this, for the firsts time, it though me as a bot and force me to verify (captcha) that's reason why I didn't like it

One more question, using CDN we can against DDOS for website?

 

[brentpresley]

Nothing is full-proof against a DDoS, especially a large one, but yet CDN will help mitigate the effects of a DDoS.

 

[ElixantTechnology]

ElixantTechnology

Where are you getting this information from? CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Typically you would use a CDN to deliver content such as images faster to users depending on their region. A valid CDN will mirror it's contents via numerous locations on a global scale, allowing the user to load the images from a location closest to them, this making load times a little bit faster. However, if you are running a website that is dynamic rather than static, this does not protect you. Sure, your images are going to be protected and always online, but your website can still fall victim to attack. It is highly recommended that you chose a provider that either offers DDoS protected services as a whole, or offers DDoS mitigation services in general.

DDoS Mitigation can be provided via. reverse proxy or GRE tunnel to protect your website's IP address.

A good provider will typically offer DDoS protection as standard, so you don't quite need to worry about this. DDoS mitigation services can end up being quite expensive as well, at least those that are done correctly.

Using a service such as CloudFlare to protect your site is not going to protect you that much, sure, if the attack is run against your domain name you are somewhat protected, however, if the attack were to be run against your IP address you are hooped, because this bypasses your "CDN" as a whole.

The best way to protect yourself from DDoS: Don't do anything to piss the wrong people off.

 

[rwsorensen]

rwsorensen

Cool @Brentpresley and @ElixantTechnology, I learned somethings from your information in this thread..they are very great!

I'd like to know if I move from SSD to normal HDD, my website will run slowly?

 

[brentpresley]

brentpresley

You know, that depends upon several factors, but the biggest one is how often you are hitting the storage pool currently. If you have a lot of mysql access, you can expect a significant performance hit when moving from SSD to HDD.

It's not a universal rule, but in general hosting is "you get what you pay for". There is no free lunch, and if you under-provision your resources you can expect there will be problems.

 

[ElixantTechnology]

ElixantTechnology

As @brentpresley said, it really does depend on what you're doing. When it comes down to your run-of-the-mill website, you're really not going to notice much of a difference at all. Jumping into large-scale transaction-intensive websites, yeah, you're going to see a difference.

 

[brentpresley]

CDN is a great anti-DDoS tool, even for dynamic content websites. It is just one extra layer of protection that allows you to mitigate large traffic bursts (DDoS, or legit).

In addition to being able to block thousands (or many many more) of IPs through our upstream provider very quickly at no cost (i.e. zero BW usage). Not all upstream providers are as responsive, however, so some hosts have to deal with the bulk of a DDoS on their end, as mentioned by Alex.

 

[Euservr]

It depends on site traffic, Site theme and Plugins. HDD or ssd is not so important, CPU and RAM is very important.