How many sites can a linux / cpanel server handle?

[enoughhosting]

We are investigating cPanel for a free web hosting service.

The reason for asking how many accounts can a linux cPanel server handle is due to the fact that we have noticed on prior windows hosting, the iis6 web server crashes after a certain number of user signups. Mainly due to metabase failure or corruption (also the file system fails or crawls when there are too many folders in it). So we are now moving from windows to linux for a better solution.

I am aware that the account number is limited by the nature of the hardware used, in this case its a dual core cpu with 4gig ram and 1000gig hard drive. Just for example.

In a perfect environment one should expect to setup 10 thousand or more accounts per linux/cpanel server, in other words unlimited. What I want to know is this, does cPanel or any part of linux web server (or system, eg. file system) fails when the number of accounts gets too high?

Lets say I am planning to create 30,000 websites(domain or sub domain) with all features on a linux box with cPanel. Would it survive or would it fail at some point?

I hope you got my point and would be grateful if you can share your ideas about the question.

[sander k]

I am planning to create 30,000 websites(domain or sub domain) with all features on a linux box with cPanel.

Are you kidding me? On one server? Thats insane!
We have about 400 websites per server. But we also have one server that only has 14 websites on it.

[enoughhosting]

Are you kidding me? On one server? Thats insane!
We have about 400 websites per server. But we also have one server that only has 14 websites on it.

I am always offended with the negative responses that I get from the users of this forum. It seems they lack the knowledge and yet they would say some thing negative and make life look impossible.

First of all, I am not talking about the commercial aspect of hosting 30k sites on a single machine, I know 1 site is enough to bring down a machine.

Lets say for example, none of my sites are getting any visitors, I am just creating 30k sites for load testing the server. Theoretically it should be able to do it, unless there is some system limitation that is preventing it from doing that.

For example we have found that windows servers fail after a few thousand sites due to its ii6 metabase error and file system slow down and corruption. On the other hand linux is said to be more robust and might have solved thouse issues. Thats what I am eager to know more about.

I would like to know more about linux limitations as @Seraphim said. Why limits, isnt linux open source? so why whold there be any barriers on number of accounts or number of sites that cpanel can create, even windows does not have any such limits!.

For your information we have created upto 5k sites on recent 2008 windows server with iis7. Its more fault tollerent than its older versions but we are looking for some thing better in linux, if there is!

[deeplist]

Lets say I am planning to create 30,000 websites(domain or sub domain) with all features on a linux box with cPanel. Would it survive or would it fail at some point?

It would fail, miserably. Even if you oversold the piss out of it, there's just no way that would even be remotely possible. A couple hundred should be the max.

[enoughhosting]

It would fail, miserably. Even if you oversold the piss out of it, there's just no way that would even be remotely possible. A couple hundred should be the max.

No, i dont agree with you. Bcs we ran over thousand sites on windows servers (2003) but yes then there were limitation, it crashed at some point due to some limitations. Linux is more tough than windows.

I guess I have to run a test machie to figure this out myself!

The tricky part here is that I am ignoring site visitors, I am just talkinig, why a bare machne cant create 10k+ sites when that is all its supposed to do! If it cant , where exactly does it fail. Does it fail at all, is it a file system failure, cant a linux box hand 100k folders , etc? Theoretically its not supposed to fail after creating only 10k sites or maybe 30k sites.

[sander k]

No, i dont agree with you. Bcs we ran over thousand sites on windows servers (2003) but yes then there were limitation, it crashed at some point due to some limitations. Linux is more tough than windows.

I guess that that kind of shown by your reputation level.

[enoughhosting]

I guess that that kind of shown by your reputation level.

Aw!, Must you hurt my feelings over this issue? I am just trying to learn some limitations and wonders of linux and share the benifits with all of you, while at it.

[deeplist]

No, i dont agree with you. Bcs we ran over thousand sites on windows servers (2003) but yes then there were limitation, it crashed at some point due to some limitations. Linux is more tough than windows.

I guess I have to run a test machie to figure this out myself!

The tricky part here is that I am ignoring site visitors, I am just talkinig, why a bare machne cant create 10k+ sites when that is all its supposed to do! If it cant , where exactly does it fail. Does it fail at all, is it a file system failure, cant a linux box hand 100k folders , etc? Theoretically its not supposed to fail after creating only 10k sites or maybe 30k sites.

You said you were investigating for a possible free host. If you actually plan on starting this "free host" then you might as well take the suggestions and info here and study it with a fine tooth comb and learn something rather than trying to discredit everything. Apparently, you don't care about the actual machine load and only how many accounts you can stuff on it under 0 load? What purpose does that serve when it's simply not relevant at all. How would that benefit you when you're trying to collect info to start a host?

Get real. What we're telling you is that ideally, a server can handle a few hundred accounts before suffering ill effects. Take our information for what it's worth. We have the experience that you lack or else you wouldn't be asking in the first place.

[enoughhosting]

You said you were investigating for a possible free host. If you actually plan on starting this "free host" then you might as well take the suggestions and info here and study it with a fine tooth comb and learn something rather than trying to discredit everything. Apparently, you don't care about the actual machine load and only how many accounts you can stuff on it under 0 load? What purpose does that serve when it's simply not relevant at all. How would that benefit you when you're trying to collect info to start a host?

Get real. What we're telling you is that ideally, a server can handle a few hundred accounts before suffering ill effects. Take our information for what it's worth. We have the experience that you lack or else you wouldn't be asking in the first place.

I do respect your values and that's why I love sharing my ideas and also learn your tactics. But then again, when you think from the scratch , why cant a linux box with cpanel on it create thousands of sites on it, assuming none is getting any visitors. I know that widows cant do it earlier due to file system limitation and few other things. Then why cant linux do it? The reason bugs me.

I am not saying linux cant do it. So I will soon start a test run on a linux box.

Now lets get to the interesting part. There is a host out there called x10hosting and many others who have a huge number of users on their free hosting service. For example x10 has over 400k users. That means if they have 500 sites/users per server then they have 800 servers, that is awefully costly and impossible to run, economically speaking. Thats what challenges your argument about overloading. Because they have done it. Its real.

[deeplist]

Now lets get to the interesting part. There is a host out there called x10hosting and many others who have a huge number of users on their free hosting service. For example x10 has over 400k users. That means if they have 500 sites/users per server then they have 800 servers, that is awefully costly and impossible to run, economically speaking. Thats what challenges your argument about overloading. Because they have done it. Its real.

I am speculating that A) their hosting spans more than one machine, and B) their servers are probably extremely oversold.

It IS possible to have 5000+ users on a single machine. I've seen it first hand. Is it practical? No. Was it stable? No. Was it oversold? Extremely.

[Seraphim]

Now lets get to the interesting part. There is a host out there called x10hosting and many others who have a huge number of users on their free hosting service. For example x10 has over 400k users. That means if they have 500 sites/users per server then they have 800 servers, that is awefully costly and impossible to run, economically speaking. Thats what challenges your argument about overloading. Because they have done it. Its real.

Or, x10 hosting has a clustered server arrangement they are using to pool the required resources. Using that they could actually do the whole job with only one maybe two such clusters, but they still would show issues with any software limitations.

I'm curious myself about this, since you have a valid point that with Linux being open source surely someone out there has a fix for the UID limitation especially if some hosts actually do have thousands of users to a machine.

But in practice by the time you actually get said thousands of users in a production environment you should be able to make enough money off of them to afford a fleet of servers and staff to manage them all. Now on the bench it might be a different story, but on the bench you can safely ignore overselling effects because none of the resources are actually being used.

I think the best way to find out is to just get in there and do it, perhaps develop a script to automate the setup and teardown so you can experiment with different stress levels to see what happens. I'd love to hear the results, because even though I am never going to oversell my stuff there may come a time when I have sufficiently large hardware to actually put thousands of people onto the same operating system install- either using clustered hardware, or a really big machine that actually has the resources to pass around.

Also, I can see where having such huge numbers of clients can make the server difficult to manage. Almost all of the daemons have to reload their config file any time they are started or restarted. Apache and MySQL in particular are likely to take a long time to do this because each account will make an entry in the configuration files.

Plus if your servers use PHP CGI or some other method of running PHP as the owning user, you'll find very quickly that you'll run out of open process IDs because each account on even the slightest of traffic will attempt to launch and maintain a worker process for PHP processing.

[TaoPhoenix]

I do respect your values and that's why I love sharing my ideas and also learn your tactics. But then again, when you think from the scratch , why cant a linux box with cpanel on it create thousands of sites on it, assuming none is getting any visitors. I know that widows cant do it earlier due to file system limitation and few other things. Then why cant linux do it? The reason bugs me.

I am not saying linux cant do it. So I will soon start a test run on a linux box.

Now lets get to the interesting part. There is a host out there called x10hosting and many others who have a huge number of users on their free hosting service. For example x10 has over 400k users. That means if they have 500 sites/users per server then they have 800 servers, that is awefully costly and impossible to run, economically speaking. Thats what challenges your argument about overloading. Because they have done it. Its real.

No lol's allowed. I once disagreed with minor points of X10 Policy but they are still here.

Let's suppose they can buy hardware at $500 on bulk /special discount. Then sure, they might have 400K users.

I kept saying that the Free Host industry blinds itself with Small Dollars, so that any random company with $10,000 to burn can rewrite this industry.

[Seraphim]

Linux has a limited number of user accounts. You physically cannot create more than a few hundred users on it before it runs out of available UIDs. CPanel depends on the Linux user structure, so there is your limit.

However the hardware you said you would be using isn't going to handle more than a hundred or so clients at a time anyway. To shoot for the 'ideal' you mentioned you would have to build your own cloud machine in order to pool the required amounts of resources into being. You would also have to make that cloud run VPSs, which then in turn are used to perform the actual hosting to get around the user limit.

All told you're better off just being a lot more realistic in your user expectations. I think you're going to find that getting users at all is quite difficult even under the best conditions possible. Nobody is going to want to join you anymore if you overload your servers like that, they'll become slow and unreliable.

[dmmcintyre3]

I helped administrate a cPanel server with 4,000 accounts and things did not work right, many of WHM's functions timed out and lots of cPanel and WHM's stuff did not work right. MySQL had issues with that many databases. But, the websites ran decent once you got them running.

[Tyler]

I helped administrate a cPanel server with 4,000 accounts and things did not work right, many of WHM's functions timed out and lots of cPanel and WHM's stuff did not work right. MySQL had issues with that many databases. But, the websites ran decent once you got them running.

What hardware did the server have and what was the load average?