Hey everyone,

I am trying to configure a server to be used for semi-dedicated hosting, for a limited number of clients.

When trying to figure out plans, I am trying to figure out how much ram should be available for each individual client. While I can't really allocate a fixed set of ram to individual clients, I was thinking due to the nature of semi-dedicated hosting (Used for high resource hungry sites) I should include 128mb for every client added on the server.

So, for example: Lets say I want this server to be able to handle 30 semi-dedicated clients. That would be 4GB of ram.

Does this sound reasonable?

Keep in mind that the set up is for a limited number of clients who require a much higher share of system resources.

Yes, that does sound reasonable. As you install accounts, you can check to see if you need more RAM or less clients on it.

128MB is very low, especially for an ecommerce site (which is what is usually looking for SemiDedicated.)

We use systems with a minimum of 12GB ram and a maximum of 20 accounts on a server - giving just over 600MB per account, and of course since it's operating in a SemiDedicated way, the users can burst the memory when needed. For the price these days of 12GB, you can still make a decent profit on your accounts. 128MB will barely run Magento, or Wordpress with a bunch of Add-on Modules. Most shopping cart softwares are requesting a boost from the normal 32MB per PHP process to be in the 90MB range per process. So with 10 visitors on a site, that can punch up to 900MB of memory tied up for the processing of the php pages.

Good thinking, while the Magento and other popular e-commerce scripts (and scripts in general) run fine on our shared servers, none of our current clients or our own sites really have take up alot of resources, so it was hard to judge the reality of having a very popular e-commerce site hosted. I'll open the server up to beta testers sometime soon and do some monitoring and figure it out before I set anything in stone.

If you don't mind me asking, how greatly does your php settings differ from your shared hosting to your semi dedicated hosting? What would be reasonable settings granted a server had on average 500-600mb of ram per clients?

For us, the base of the server is very similar as all our servers are PCI Compliant machines and are designed for eCommerce sites in particular. Our server configuration does differ from other hosts in regards to the software that we have installed and various sections of our server which are closed off. We also run advanced PCI Compliance in accordance to the PCI-DSS and the PCI Security Council which requires that one server is used for databases, one for web pages and another for mail. All connections done through sFTP and lot of other fun things. This is overkill for MANY users, but if they truely want to be PCI Compliant, then we do offer those features.

As you can imagine, a setup designed for 200 shared users would differ from that of 20. Much of the setup however has to do with how Apache (or LightSpeed) operate and most importantly how MySQL operates.

Servers are constantly monitored and while we have our own internal cap of 20 users, sometimes depending on the sites active on the machine we can only put 5 or 8 accounts. It really depends on what our end users are doing for the most part, especially since they have access to override the php.ini using their own custom settings.

its depend per company ask the company