got my first server this month - finally got out of the web of virtual hosting!

here are the specs:

P-III 800 MHz Coppermine
192 ECC RAM
20 GB IDE
3Com NIC
70GB/mo (average rate)

The server is at Dialtone Internet, which is connected to 5 backbones (two OC-3s and three DS-3s), and there wasn't any setup fee. Cost : $190/mo.

Yvonne was the sales rep, really nice and quick to work with, and everything was done on time. Machine accidentally had PHP3 installed instead of PHP4, they fixed it within 12 hours of logging a request.

I upgraded apache, installed mod_gzip and it looks fantastic. I busted the server-interface, because I ran CPAN and it upgraded Perl and other stuff. but the DI guys let me know how to add IPs, virt-sites and DNS through the command line interface.

everything looks good. can anyone tell me if bandwidth measured by avg. rate is better than actual bandwidth usage for the user? I have moved one of my sites, FindMIDIs.com onto it, and mod_gzip has really speeded it up and reduced daily bw from 1.5GB to .9GB. can anyone tell me how mod_perl can help this site because adcycle and other CGI scripts can sometime occupy 0.5% of CPU time.