Here are my current needs:
space for 8 websites. 7 small ones, and one 100MB+ ASP/Access intensive dynamic site.

Current issues: I'm spending over $100 a month in hosting and still getting mediocre service from the 3 different hosts. My ASP site was OK with Innerhost, but Interland gobbled them up and the service level has dropped way off.

Skills: Basic admin skills with interest in learning more.

Future needs: 25 small websites in addition to the big ASP site having 1000 unique visitors a day. MSSQL as I will reach the Access ceiling in a few months. Email services.

Please tell me if I can get away with MSSQL/Win2K3/Merak mail on the following:
1u case
Dual P4 2.4
1 GB ECC
2x36 GB Mirrored Raid

This evening I spoke with a Dell Salesperson who had experience managing web servers. He basically told me he didn't want to sell me anything because it wouldn't suit my needs. He suggested that I need to have 1 box for each service. If I could not afford the $10k-$15k then I should look at a managed environment.

Any thoughts?

PS: My plan is to colocate.

It will work fine. You only need to increase the memory as much as you can afford.

Let me know if you have more questions

That server will work fine for your needs. You may also want to look at a company that can offer you a lease-to-own program with management services to help you get started.

Mike & greatdeal...thanks for the replies.

Managed hosting is not for me. I'm basing that on pricing and the fact that I like the admin role.

I've now received 2 votes of confidence versus the 1 "you're crazy" response from Dell. Does anyone else have any input and first-hand knowledge on my proposed plan?

The Dell guy could be greedy... or he could have simply asked more questions. Specifically, how busy are the sites in terms of web/sql and mail usage? How many mail accounts and simultaneous client connections do you expect?

I have an old dual P3-800 running Win2K server with Apache, Mysql, Merak and a lot of custom stuff running on it and it handles a few dozen of my own sites (all but 3 are relatively low volume) with ease.

The Dell guy is just being a sales person and following MS's recommendations. Reality wise, your configuration should work fine as long as you don't run hundreds of hosting against the MSSQL server with high amounts of access + e-mail and websites. A heavily trafficked MSSQL server should run on its own, but with what you are needing, I vote your proposed solution will work fine.

You should be fine. In fact, your server might even be a little over kill with SCSI drives and Dual 2.4 Xeons. You'd be better off going with IDE RAID, slightly slower processors and more memory, especially if you want to run SQL on the same box. Even under a small load, it likes to consume a ton of memory.

If you're worried about the price then sure downgrade to a lower spec'ed machine. But keep in mind the higher spec'ed machine will allow your server to have a longer production life and limit the need to upgrade.

Thank you to everyone for their comments! Really appreciated!

I couldn't agree more, lower specs, this dual box sounds like complete overkill. Get one of those IDE SuperRaid boxes from Servermatrix and you'll be in good shape for a long time, 1000 visitors per day is practically nothing. And 1 GB of ram should be plenty, even for ASP and MSSQL on the same box.

Another vote from me - a standard superserver box or similar from SM will do all that you need, you can also rent SQL Server from them for around $120-$150 dollars a month.

Another thing to consider - SM are offering shared SQL space very shortly, you could run those sites and email on somthing as simple as one of their celeron boxes and put the SQL db on their shared server.