Could more paysites use virtual servers?

[VirtuozzoSimon]

Hi all,

I know this board is frequented by people that work in large paysites. I'm trying to see how useful the stuff I sell is to you guys (link in sig).

The way I see it there are 2 types of traffic in porn:

1) "Static" content: ie pics and vids that are downloaded to a user's computer as whole files. This is the majority of what galleries and TGP's provide. Usually hosted by affiliate webmasters on their own. Alot of these are hosted by sponsor freehosts as well.

2) "Streaming" content: ie either existing streaming vids or webcam stuff. Most of this seams to be hosted by the sponsors.

For the first kind of traffic it seems to be more about quality of bandwidth, rather than hardware.

In my eyes however, virtual servers should offer an attractive alternative for streaming content to a traditional dedicated server model. I say this because this type of media is more intense on the hardware than static files. Virtuozzo allows you to better allocate the server's physical resources, thereby allowing you to get more out of existing hardware.

Right now some of the largest hosting companies in the world use Virtuozzo (ie GoDaddy, ThePlanet). We also signed a large BDSM site a few months ago. I'm not saying this to gloat, just to show you that the technology already works great for them, so in theory it should work great for other paysites as well.

I'd love to hear why my theory is correct or incorrect in practice. Get nitty gritty on the technical side if you have to. Thanks in advance. Peace.

[zagi]

Sure, why would you segment a server when you can run all the applications under a regular non-virtualized OS.

I think virtualizing would only create more overhead and hence reduce performance, where is the benefit?

[Doctor Dre]

Big paysites use so much bandwith they need many many servers ... there is no real market in a virtual host for paysite owners ... lots of scripts, lots of disk space ... and lots of bandwidth. They need total control over their stuff.

[VirtuozzoSimon]

Originally Posted by zagi

Sure, why would you segment a server when you can run all the applications under a regular non-virtualized OS.

I think virtualizing would only create more overhead and hence reduce performance, where is the benefit?

Independence and isolation for the application primarily. You can better control the resources each application gets this way (by dedicating a virtual server to each one). If that application fails, it won't take the whole box with it.

Having said that, overhead is not much of an issue with us (3% for Linux, 5% for 2k3-mostly to memory). So the hardware performance is not affected.

[VirtuozzoSimon]

Originally Posted by Doctor Dre

Big paysites use so much bandwith they need many many servers ... there is no real market in a virtual host for paysite owners ... lots of scripts, lots of disk space ... and lots of bandwidth. They need total control over their stuff.

Virtuozzo is not a virtual host. It is the technology many hosting companies use to create virtual servers with

Exactly because paysites use so many resources and want total control, I am trying to see if installing Virtuozzo on their servers will help

Rolling out a new physical server takes a few steps. If this is something that is done often, it can add up. Rolling out a new virtual server on existing hardware can be done in a matter of seconds.

If the CPU and memory are not maxed out on existing hardware, adding a virtual server will increase hardware utilization while not affecting existing data.

[dubsix]

Xen is free and better imho ;)

[aflex]

seems like a vmware rip off.. if youre gonna go virtual.. use VMware ESX

[aflex]

http://www.virtuozzo.com/en/products/virtuozzo/

I wouldnt feel safe running a Production/Website on a Virtual Machine that is dependent on the Host OS to be up.. major red flag