What have been your experiences with AMD and Celeron based servers for hosting. I see many paeople advertising these and obviously they are cheaper but do they do well for hosting (especially with IDE drives)?

Just from what I have heard on these forums, as to celron, is the difference with celeron and pentuim is the cache. The celerons have less, which is the expensive part, so as a result slow prossesing time, between the two I would go with a amd, even though I heard they tend to heat up. Xeon all the way for me :)

I use AMD Duron processors for our servers. Haven't had any problems. In fact, our CPU is always 98% idle. =)

when it comes to hosting is a faster cpu more important than extra RAM

for instance which would be better for hosting
p3 500mhz with 758mb ram

or

p3 800mhz with 256mb ram?

In the example you gave, I think more RAM is more important.

depends on your need ..
I can generally say that ..

processor power is good for computations ..
ram is good for data handling ..

If you have lots of hits to simple MySQL operations, RAM will be the way to go, if you have lots of complex queries, comparisons or computations (encryption is a lot of computations) then CPU power is usually the factor ..

The idea is to try to predict good balance ..

remember that its easier to add more ram than to replace the CPU, but that doesn't matter if there is no chance you will add more ram if you find it needed.

BTW, there is an interesting offer in the special offers forum giving 1.2 GHz AMD or 1 GHz P3 with 1 gig ram and 100 GB B/W for just 125$ ..

just thought you might wanna consider it.