Mac360 completed a move from our PowerMac G5 server running Mac OS X here in Honolulu (under my desk), to an Apple Xserve located at ServerLogistics in Los Angeles. Our initial tests and subsequent experience shows that the Xserve renders and serves Mac360’s web pages about 4x to 6x faster than the PowerMac G5. In fact, the move was so straightforward and painless that we completed the transfer a full four days earlier than anticipated.

ServerLogistics (SL) is a Mac server host, featuring PowerMac G5s, Xserves, and co-location facitlities. While we wanted a host that would provide dependable service and sufficient bandwidth and horsepower for future growth of Mac360’s needs, there was just something extra about hosting on a Mac. After all, Mac360 is about Macs. SL provides a few items in their service that are more difficult for us to maintain, such as redundancy, database backup, multiple email servers, and so on.

For anyone who wants to run a Mac as a server or web site, there are a number of issues to consider. Redundancy is one. “Up Time” is another. We managed to keep Mac360 up about 99.5% of the time, which isn’t too bad, considering the site was running on a stock PowerMac G5 sitting under a desk. That means the site was down for about 10-minutes once a week.

Here’s how “Up Time” works. Turn on your Mac, leave it running for a month, and it’s “up” 100% of the time. 99% up time means about 7 hours a month of down time. 99.9% up time means about 45-minutes a month of downtime. 99.99% up time means less than 5 minutes of down time per month. Apple releases some kind of Security Update and OS X Update, on average, about once per month, which usually requires a reboot. Database backups are more easily handled when traffic is low, so we usually stopped the site for about 10-minutes each week during the backups, then did updates, and a reboot, hence the 99.5% up time average.

Redundancy is an issue, too. Even with multiple hard drives, what do you do when the Mac’s motherboard dies? That means getting a ‘swap out’ or a repair, which means ‘down time.’

In the future, we’d like to run a couple of our own Xserves using Apple’s Remote Desktop. If you’ve ever set up and run a Linux server or any Unix-like server, Apple’s remote set up and management is a breeze in comparison. That’s our goal. For now, we’re very pleased with ServerLogistics’ Xserve performance.

We’ve been running Mac360 on the Apple Xserve at Server Logistics for a couple of weeks. Performance so far has been outstanding. While we don’t expect to improve much on our average uptime of around 99.5%, the target is 99.9% (about 45 minutes down each month), we’re pleased with the steady uptime and support.

We’re also tracking stats via Google Analytics and will provide readers with a separate report. GA has improved over the past year or so and is a decent tool for tracking visitors, referrers, and so on. It’s hard to beat the price. We tried using Mint again, but found the accuracy questionable, and too many bugs.

GA has some nifty tools which have helped us trim unused links on the site, resulting in less clutter and faster page load times. More to come…

I’ve been highly critical of Google Analytics in the past, both for reasons of inaccurate data, and for scrapping Urchin, which was a great product.

Google continues to improve Google Analytics so we’re using it exclusively on our sites. The data collected is substantial, though not quite as accurate as tracking via server logs. The display is superb, especially if you love AJAX data displays. And you can’t beat the price.

Two Updates:

1 - we’re approaching 90 days of using ServerLogistics’ Intel Mac Xserve to host Mac360. Uptime is 99.9%, which is about what we averaged using our own dedicated PowerMac G5 and OS X Tiger Server. However, the Xserve is about 3x to 5x faster than the G5 at rendering pages. Service has been excellent.

2 - Google Analytics has been updated to provide even more information about web site traffic; more detail, automated reports, etc. However, GA is no longer near real time. The previous version would display data updates about three hours later than real time. The new version is a day late. I haven’t figured out how to pull up hourly reports.

I notice that Mac360 is still running on a Xserve at Server Logistics, but that Kate’s new site is on Pair Networks. Why the difference?

Danny Boy - 10 April 2008 06:42 PM

I notice that Mac360 is still running on a Xserve at Server Logistics, but that Kate’s new site is on Pair Networks. Why the difference?

ServerLogistics costs more. Actually, I set up PixoBebo on PairLite, which gives me multiple sites for less than $10 a month. Ron set up one of his new sites there, too, and forgot to update his credit card info so they shut it off.

Some hosts offer a laundry list of features and services, while others keep to the basics. I just wanted basic for PixoBebo-- MySQL, PHP, Apache, webmail, and a few other goodies. Ron has some sites on Site5 and you won’t believe the number of features they offer. You need a book to figure out that stuff.