After opening serveral threads at highly busy forums about pricing and getting members options about what should and shount be offered it was brought to my attention as one member said:

Server RAM is a tad weak for crunching data I hope there won't be more then a few accounts per box

this is reply to a server with 512 ram on a Pentium IV 1.7Ghz running linux. Now I know its good to have 1gig of ram but what do you think a server running 512 would be able to handle "refering to accounts"

Thanks

Why not just put 512 in there, see where you stand. If you need more, just add more later. :)

It really depends on the types of websites. I've seen 200 websites per 512 before, but I have also seen one website take 512.

You really shouldn't base it on how many sites you can stuff on one machine. Once the ram is depleted and it starts using swap, you should make then make a base line analysis and upgrade accordingly.

I run a 300 MHz box with 128 MB RAM ("white box" Linux). It's a low-traffic site (after a couple months uptime, we broke 1 GB transfer...), but it handles the load. We're using a little over 80 MB of it (load average 0.00 0.00 0.00), but it's essentially a desktop (Mandrake) that we run Apache/PHP/MySQL/etc. on, so it'd be a far stretch to call it performance-tuned.

Anyway, I think 512 MB is plenty. Hundreds of sites might be excessive, but if you're not hosting extremely busy sites, there should be no problem at all with dozens of sites.

i tend to upgrade it to 1 gig of ram but for starters with cost and all I have to stay at 512 for now. Thanks for everyones imput