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I am aware of the dangers of this question being non-constructive so bear in mind I did my best to narrow the possible answers I get.

I am swapping an old dedicated Gentoo server for a new one, and considering the amount of memory and processor it will have compared to the previous one, I have decided to go for virtualization using OpenVZ containers and Proxmox.

My question is what would be the best setup for a server that will be serving 4 or 5 websites (with at most 500 hits per day overall), between those two from a performance and maintenance point of view ?

  • Provision a container for every website and maintain (at least) BIND, mysql and apache on every container.
  • Provision a container for every service, one for BIND, one for apache and one for mysql.

Common sense makes me believe that I will have better resource utilization with the second option but I want to have some opinions/insight before making the decision.

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Option 1 would be less easy to administrate and probably also less performant:

Consider how to deploy a change to a single service (binary upgrade, bug fix, global configuration etc.): Easier to do when there's only a single instance of each service.
You could, however, create shared disk space between all instances.

Also, performance wise, if there's only one instance of a service, you can share resources like caches etc. among all web sites.

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