Server:

I wish to purchase (not rent) a win2k server preferably at the place I collocate with the following specifications;

Dual 1.GHz Tualatin's (must be high quality+reliable)
512mb SDRAM (how much for 1024mb RAM?)
3-18gb SCSI Hard Disks RAID5 (Stripped)
Win2k 5 client server edition license

Setup and working with Win2k (remote access needed, we'll install pcanywhere)
We have our own administrators to admin the software side of the server after we get remote access.

Collocation:

- Phone support required 24/7
- Get hold of an onsite tech 24/7 (for reboots)
- Collocate for the above server
- 6 month collocation contract + 30gb/mo bandwidth
- UPS facility
- uptime guarantee
- very good connection to Europe
- Roughly $3/gig bandwidth
- Temporary server we could jump on to (we will have backups) in case of emergency such as hardware failure. (We pay extra for this if it's needed)

What exactly are you asking?

Personally, I'm curious why a machine needs such horsepower (CPU) + hard disk with so little RAM :) RAM is your friend when it comes to performance.

I find much better performance using cheap IDE hard drives but upping the RAM.

Actually, we have found that with W2K a lot of people over estimate the amount of RAM needed unless you are doing DB stuff. We have lots of webservers and streaming servers that run great on only 256 MB RAM.

Rackmy: yes, but I was specifically tageting why he was spending so much on the RAID SCSI hard drives.

It must be to run a database or other heavy application? Web pages surely don't need that much CPU + disk I/O.

Also: True, without any effort, Win2K will only use 128MB of RAM running generic web pages. However, you can tell the system to use more ram for disk cache (system level)... or if you are using ASP applications you can cache things manually (Application variables)....

This can make THOUSDANDS of times improvements in performance that CPU + hard disks can not :)

I agree, but most web servers don't need more than 256 MB of RAM and a single processor :) It's funny to see how much a server can do with so little. We have .asf streaming servers that run on single PIIIs with 256 MB RAM and can push 45 Mbps of streams without even breaking a sweat. Then we have resource intensive, totally dynamic ASP websites that do 4-5 Mbps and handle 1000s of people every day on a single Celeron and 384 MB RAM. Don't always need the biggest and baddest!

Then on the other hand, we have servers with dual procs & 4 GB RAM that cannot handle 5 concurrent users :)

Hi Rackmy.com,

You mentioned:

"Then on the other hand, we have servers with dual procs & 4 GB RAM that cannot handle 5 concurrent users"

I'm curious, could you please elaborate on these systems? What kind of machine/app/use do these systems fall into? Why the low number of concurrent users?


Thanks a lot,

Louis