Hey, just want to say hi to everyone, just joined a few minutes ago.


Anyway, I have a question to ask. Me and a friend of mine are saving to buy a server. The cost will probably be between 2000-3000 dollars.

The server will host 2 sites and will be hosted at my house.

We could only spend such little on bandwidth, lets say around 70 dollars a month or less.

We will probably need 100GB of bandwidth on our server.

Any suggestions? Please help us out.

Thanks

Originally posted by squank
Anyway, I have a question to ask. Me and a friend of mine are saving to buy a server. The cost will probably be between 2000-3000 dollars.

Mistake #1: buying an expensive server when a much cheaper one is sufficient.

The server will host 2 sites and will be hosted at my house.

Mistake #2: Wanting to run a server out of your basement/garage/etc.

We could only spend such little on bandwidth, lets say around 70 dollars a month or less.

We will probably need 100GB of bandwidth on our server.

Mistake #3: underestimating the cost of bandwidth.

Any suggestions? Please help us out.

First, why buy a server at all, and even if you must buy one, why spend so much on it? 100GB/month isn't much bandwidth; how much server you need to handle that depends largely upon the type of sites you're planning on hosting -- dynamic database-driven sites require more CPU, RAM, and disk than equivalent static sites -- but you should still be able to get a server to meet your needs for much less than $3000.

Second, you can't run it out of your home. Remember the "last mile" -- most of the cost of internet access is incurred in carrying packets from an ISP's local offices to a home. Bandwidth-to-the-home is at least twice as expensive as bandwidth-to-the-local-colocation-facility.

Third, even at the cheapest of colocation facilities, you'll be paying more than $70/month for 100GB/month of bandwidth. Spend less on your server and more on bandwidth -- or sign up for one of the many dedicated servers available.

If you want to give more details about what you'll be using the server for, I'm sure people can give more advice.

Hello squank,

You might want to take a look at your server budget, first. You state you are going to be hosting two sites-are you planning on growing beyond that amount, or is the server going to be dedicated to them?

What OS are you planning on using? If you are using NT,you'll need a powerful machine, but if you are using Unix/Linux, you can pick up a 486 at a flea market and host on that-just put enough RAM on it. Hosting servers like plenty of RAM if you've got scripts running, but the processor doesn't really get much of a workout. One of the webservers we've got in our house is only a 486, running about half a dozen sites on it, and it was busy enough to saturate a full T1, until I had to tell my friends it was time to pay someone to host their porn site, I couldn't afford to give them most of my bandwidth for free.

One of the biggest misconceptions I've seen is that you need a powerful machine to be a webserver-our network admin collects Commodore computers and he had an Amiga running as a webserver for a while.

The exception to this is NT servers as you need as much under the hood as you can get just to run the OS.

What may be an issue for you is your bandwidth. 100GB of bandwidth is nothing to sneeze at, and as it tends to be rather bursty, I don't know if you are going to get enough for 70 bucks/month.

DSL is about the only thing in your range, and that would be ADSL it's designed for people to be able to download at high speeds, not to upload at them, and usually the upload speed is about 56k for the lowest price ADSL (at least in the Boston metro market now controlled by Verizon) your price may vary. Reliability is also iffy, as is the fact that a lot of DSL providers have crashed and burned lately, and many of the rest are circling the bowl. It's possible you could get a promotional price on SDSL that will fit into your budget.

Listen to those guys that posted above. Very good advice.

I have to second everything they all said also and add this. You need to do system requirement for the two sites you're thinking about hosting. What are they going to be used for? What application will run on them etc. Then take that and ask yourself, is this going to be profitable? Is paying 2-3000 $ for a server a smart move or can I start small and grow. You can get a dedicated server for about $99 to $200 a month that will be fine for two sites. Don't even start with the bandwidth. You can get a T1 to your house for about $1400 per month and then you will need routers and other equipment to use them. Expensive! But again I don't know what these servers are going to do so I can comment but putting all of this at your home is not advisable. Your electricity isn't optimized for servers at home, what about redundant power, protective power etc. I can go on and on but I think you get the idea.

Take out your pen and paper and start drawing out your requirement and then come back here and post them. We can help you out from there.

Ben