Visvanath Ratnaweera

The VPS is https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ > Shared Regular Performance > CPX32.

Hi Ken

As the perpetrator of Go Daddy! (Where to?) I thought it is not appropriate for me to talk about other hosting providers.

 

Since you've asked:

HETZNER (you can set the language to English) is a big hosting provider with HQ in Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria. They have data centers in other countries, Helsinki, Finland, for example. OK, "big" for European standards, not like the 100 GW data center OpenAI is striving for. And in contrast, HETZNER is concerned about the environment, green/renewable energy, etc. Still the prices are very competitive and compared to the neighbouring Switzerland, very reasonable.

 

I have had servers, VPSes and dedicated, on and off. Even today I own a dedicated server at Hetzner for cloning sites. As a big operation they have automated the admin interface which they call "robot" (not the "panels", with this you can re-install the system even, request additional hardware,..) once you got to know their tools, it is a 24/7 operation. I don't know the support quality today, I haven't had the need this time. In a previous round, a long-time ago, it was overall positive.

 

The documentation is vast, follow the homepage I linked above.

 

Transparency: I am not sponsored nor get any profit to talk for them! 

Gentlemen

The OP asks:

>> What I am specifically looking for:
>>
>> Are there any community-trusted, step-by-step guides for setting up this specific stack (LEMP on Ubuntu) for production?
>>
>> Is this Official Ubuntu guide recommended for my setup? 

 

You both say:

Such a goal does begin with choosing where to host.  'Scalable' ... is that really a key goal for the OP?

Uhhhh .... Moodle HQ host with Amazon, doesn't it?

Link shared about Amazon is highended ...

AWS is the well proven route for High performance and availability on Moodle quizzing.

Are you implying that the DIY route, VPS or dedicated at hosting providers and and installation guides like the Ubuntu guide mentioned are not the way to go?

And Ken raised the question:

probably too expensive for most, but we really don't know the OP, do we?

That is exactly I was going to ask. The AWS scales automatically according to the load, and the cost is metered accordingly, it says everywhere - I have no first-hand experience though. Do have have the cost, in numbers USD, ideally first-hand, from a heavily used Moodle site on AWS? We know a little bit about the OP. He is from the Indian sub-continent. We know the size of the population, India 1,400 million, Pakistan 259 million, Bangladesh 179 million, Nepal 29 million, Sri Lanka 23 million. And these are young populations. In Sri Lanka, for example, out of the 23 million 4 million goes to school. I know first-hand of the student numbers in a couple of universities there.

And Marcus wrote:

you can do it yourself, but you can also cut your own hair and do your own plumbing.

I don't think, you imply that they can't? 

Again, I have first-hand experience with a couple of them. If I leave Sri Lanka out, because I'm biased, a couple of years ago I looked in to the Moodle infrastructure of a South Indian university. Huge numbers I can't imagine. Whatever they had an on-premise, state-of-art (at that time) dedicated server, Ubuntu or RedHat, can't remember, running well during "distributed" operation but hits a limit during synchronous exams (all N candidates sit in the same time-slot). N was disappointingly low, like 250. Found the bottleneck in a setting somewhere, released it, the next time it was 500+. That went for some time, everybody looking for the next bottleneck, found quite a few collectively, cleared them, what I heard last time that they passed the 1000 mark and happy. Initially they wanted to go even higher and they realized that they don't need more since they don't have more client PCs!

BTW, I've found where AWS entered the picture, it is Marcus:

it is common for people to use things like autoscaling with AWS

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=473461#p1896870

Really? Where? I can check from about 20+ Moodle installations in tertiary education, so for I haven't encounter a single one on AWS. All on-premise somewhere in the island. Doesn't make sense either, to distribute servers all over the world, when the country is an island ocean all around. Imagine, every click a student makes travels across the continent to a data center run by a US Tech oligarch and back. Many of the students and academics are engineers, mind you. 

OK, forget all that, what about when the earth burns, like happening right now: AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now?

Still, I am curious how you as a Brit zeroed in to this one solution of all solutions, of guiding the world to Jeff Bezos. Usually you are transparent about your employer, but Catalyst is Canadian, I AFAIK. The fact that Catalyst is AWS Partner didn't play a role in this advice, I trust.

I never knew either that Moodle "architecture" is that huge!

BTW, where did AWS enter the picture? The OP didn't say anything about AWS, he is on DIY VPSes and Ubuntu Linux.

Whatever, the performance topic has migrated to the Hardware and performance forum, visit Page loads very fast but header menu loads after some time.