# Contabo experience with Plesk, Webmin or other server-admin setup?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [October 23, 2017, 11:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595 "2017-10-23T11:16:09Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@dalerka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dalerka)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 11:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/1 "2017-10-23T11:16:09Z")
Hey guys! Can someone comment about experience and gotchas of hosting with [Contabo.com](https://contabo.com/?show=configurator&vserver_id=193)?
They seem very affordable, but have a pretty “old-school” admin panel and offer to install Plesk or Webmin.
Does it even make sense to install such tools (if I’m not going to host apps like Wordpress or resell hosting on the same machine)?
What are the benefits and downsides of using Plesk or Webmin or some other admin tool on the server dedicated for Discourse instance?
What is the recommended and sufficient set of tools to install for monitoring and maintenance of a Discourse-only machine?
I’m new to such tools and will appreciate any advice on good server management and monitoring practices.
EDIT: I reviewed the following topics, but still your input to questions above is very appreciated.
- [How to install discourse alongside Plesk - #5 by Dan\_G](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-install-discourse-alongside-plesk/48103/5)
- [Dedicated Server with Plesk Onyx to Discourse + Wordpress - #2 by pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dedicated-server-with-plesk-onyx-to-discourse-wordpress/59206/2)
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 11:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/2 "2017-10-23T11:52:35Z")
Your life will be much easier if you don’t try to work with such tools. It’s possible, but if you’re not going to use them to continue to change your configuration they bring nothing to the party.
I’ve written most of a rails app that will install Discourse, but have been too busy working to get it finished
Usually upgrades can be done from Discourse’s web interface,though sometimes running a command from a shell is required. Monitoring did you can do with whatever tools the hosting service provides (digital ocean has some pretty graphs) or use a third party service.
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### Author:  [@dalerka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dalerka)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 12:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/3 "2017-10-23T12:32:31Z")
Thanks, @pfaffman! I see, folks at CDCK [use both](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-tools-used-for-discourse-development/33577/2) Prometheus and Pingdom (which can get quite pricey).
Can someone point me to a post/article about running a large Discourse forum with a balanced view on using paid & FOSS tools for monitoring and tuning the performance?
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 1:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/4 "2017-10-23T13:56:16Z")
For the most part, people with experience driving large forums are too busy running them to write much about it.
Mostly, you need ram and fast cpu and ssd.
What does large mean? How many users, posts, page views?
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### Author:  [@dalerka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dalerka)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 5:05pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/5 "2017-10-23T17:05:50Z")
Makes sense 🙂
Let’s consider a forum as _pretty large_ with 50k-100k monthly active users generating around 1 mil. pageviews/mo. (and suppose the traffic is steady, i.e. no significant frequent spikes).
What could be the _roughly sufficient figures_ for RAM & CPU?
And what would be a _fairly sane setup_ in terms of monitoring, security and performance management?
I understand there are many variables, approaches and caveats here, but hopefully folks can share their experiences in the scope of running Discourse-based forums.
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/6 "2017-10-23T17:12:42Z")
The number of posts and users in your database is an indicator of how big the database is. You don’t include that, so this is still a guess.
I’ve got a couple forums about like that. One’s on a Digital Ocean 8GB droplet. The other is on a 12GB High CPU instance.
I’d recommend separate data and web containers. You may want to tweak the mem settings for the database and number of unicorn workers.
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### Author:  [@dalerka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dalerka)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2017, 5:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/7 "2017-10-24T05:16:58Z")
Thanks, that’s pretty interesting! Any chance you could share your experiences in a tutorial or here, especially _how to tweak_ the settings for mem and unicorns, based on your examples?
Does it make sense to have separate containers (for data and web app) on the same VPS machine?
Can you elaborate on such setup as to 5 yr old?
What gains and caveats are there with such setup?
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2017, 4:47pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/8 "2017-10-24T16:47:06Z")
> [@dalerka](#):
>
> Any chance you could share your experiences in a tutorial or here, especially how to tweak the settings for mem and unicorns, based on your examples?
There are comments in the config files with suggestions.
> [@dalerka](#):
>
> Does it make sense to have separate containers (for data and web app) on the same VPS machine?
Yes. See [Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084)
> [@dalerka](#):
>
> Can you elaborate on such setup as to 5 yr old?
I’ve worked hard to see that `discourse-setup` will work for a 5 year old and it works pretty well for lots of people. It’s not really reasonable to expect a 5 year old to be able to manage a site with a million page views per month.
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### Author:  [@dalerka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dalerka)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2017, 5:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/9 "2017-10-25T05:38:23Z")
Hmm… I reviewed the linked thread and seems like since 2014 the _multi-core_ and _multi-container_ setup is still quite questionable (pains vs. gains) and very use-case dependent. Thanks anyway, I’ll keep it simple. 🙂
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/63):
>
> you strongly recommend to separate containers, but can anyone explain a little more what happens if we don’t?
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/64):
>
> Not much happens, you just get slightly longer down times when you rebuild. Not that bad.
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/121):
>
> I would strongly recommend you run in a multicontainer environment **if you are doing multisite** , then use createdb to create the databases by entering the postgres container.
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/126):
>
> I’d really like to avoid having to run a multi-container setup as it doesn’t really have an advantage for me, and brings a lot of additional complexity (including having to migrate from my current setup).
>
> > [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/125):
> >
> > One significant advantage, and why I think that it makes sense even for a single site, is that you can bootstrap from the command line without taking the site down for 5-15 minutes.
>
> Bootstrapping has become such a rare event (thanks to Docker Manager) that this simply isn’t a strong enough argument to convince me to spend some hours adding complexity 🙂
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/127):
>
> Some time ago I had time to configure multisite with 3 containers: data, web, and redis. All was working fine until one day I upgraded, and bam, something wrong happened and I had to revert to single site from backups.
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### Author:  [@fefrei](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fefrei)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2017, 6:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/10 "2017-10-25T06:10:09Z")
Just to clarify: Multisite is something different then separating the web and database containers.
- Separating web and database containers allows you to run both containers on different machines and to shorten the rebuild time (by creating a new web container and migrating the database in the background while the old web container is still running).
- Multisite is about hosting many sites on the same machine. You could do this by running multiple containers, but then the RAM requirements would scale linearly with the number of sites you host. With multisite, multiple sites are served by the same container, so resource consumption for many small sites will be just as much as for one large site with the same size and activity (plus for a _tiny_ overhead per site) 🙂
I’ve personally avoided a multi-container setup (because I don’t care about a few minutes of downtime on the occasional rebuild), but am using multisite (because I’m hosting more sites an a single machine than the host has gigabytes of RAM 😉).
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 25, 2017, 6:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/11 "2017-10-25T18:43:33Z")
> [@dalerka](#):
>
> Hmm… I reviewed the linked thread and seems like since 2014 the multi-core and multi-container setup is still quite questionable (pains vs. gains) and very use-case dependent. Thanks anyway, I’ll keep it simple.
It’s a real bummer to have your site down for 2-10 minutes (depending on number of plugins and network and CPU speed) to add a plugin or do a rebuild to upgrade when it’s required. Once a two-container configuration is set up, it’s pretty much the same as a one-container setup except that you can rebuild your web server while the old one continues to work.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2017, 5:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/contabo-experience-with-plesk-webmin-or-other-server-admin-setup/72595/12 "2017-10-29T17:52:30Z")
> [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/127):
>
> > [@Multisite configuration with Docker](https://meta.discourse.org/t/multisite-configuration-with-docker/14084/127):
> >
> > something wrong happened and I had to revert to single site from backups.
Note that since then I moved back to multisite and multi-containers, with no problem on upgrades.