My sites are currently on a dedicated P3 - 733 with 256 ram. It has been more than adequate for my needs, but the contract I have for hosting in exchange for advertising space has run out and the hosting company doesn't want to pick it back up. So now I am going to have to pay for a server myself :bawling:

I have the challenge of doing this on a tight budget.

I have been reading about rackshack and I am considering going with one of their raq deals. I have never used raq and would like feedback.

Currently I am using 50 to 60 Gig a month. Most of that is delivering an applet that is displayed on other peoples sites. About 10,000 applets are downloaded a day. I am considering changing the applets to a flash display in a few months - I think I can cut on the file size of the applets using flash.

Then I have about 3000 pages a day accessed that use php to access data from my mysql database.

I have a couple of cron jobs that run once an hour that download data from another site and updates about 250 small scripts that are accessed when the applets are downloaded.

I don't know how much cpu power this all takes, and don't know how to measure it (the webpanel that comes with my current hosting service doesen't have a way to measure cpu, is there a way to telnet in and get a measurement?).

I have read in these forums that Raq cpu power is limited. Will this be too much for a raq4i - 256 to handle?

Would I be better off adding the 512 ram to it from the beginning? (rackshack basic plan and the 512 upgrade). OR would it be better to go with the plus package with 384 ram and two hard drives? I don't need that much hard drive space, but does have two hard drives make the machine faster - maybe put the db on one and the rest of the site on the other?

Sorry for the length of this but I wanted to provide as much detail as I could to see how you guys think would be the best way to do this. I would appreciate any thoughts you have about this,

Thank you,

Chris

Originally posted by Christopher
Would I be better off adding the 512 ram to it from the beginning? (rackshack basic plan and the 512 upgrade). OR would it be better to go with the plus package with 384 ram and two hard drives? I don't need that much hard drive space, but does have two hard drives make the machine faster - maybe put the db on one and the rest of the site on the other?

Chris, just a couple of comments... Would you be better off adding 512 from the start? Most likely, and it couldn't hurt (especially if the price is right).

The Plus one has 2 HD's, but it won't make the machine go faster, and you won't be able to use both for different functions. The 2nd HD mirrors the first (RAID-1), which is used in case the 1st HD take a digger and goes to hard drive heaven.

*moment of silence*

Serving a flash file, shouldn't take too much out of the server, so I'd think it would be able to handle it. The flash or java are client side, not server side so you are talking about the transfer for the most part. Extra ram for the 3,000 pages (the php/SQL hits), wouldn't hurt as I said, and you should be fine.

Thank you Chicken, I have been doing webstuff for years but there are so many things that I still don't know, like the two hard drives being mirrors of each other, I have seen 'raid-1' banty'd about but never knew what it referred to.

Learning as I go and I thank you for your sharing of knowledge :)

Chris

Originally posted by Christopher
I have been doing webstuff for years but there are so many things that I still don't know...

The moment you figure it all out, they'll change everything so you have to start at the beginning. :D