Hi,

Your mission, if you should choose to accept it, is to speck out the ideal server setup for running a web hosting business.

You want to build a good, growing, sustainable and profitable hosting business. You're going to put this/these server(s) in a co-lo and manage it yourself.

What would the specs of the server(s) be?

What would the individual components be (i.e. motherboard & chipset, HDD, CPU, memory, NIC, case/PSU, etc.)?

What OS, software and control panel (if any) would you choose?

Be as specific as you please...the more details (and why) the better! For instance, how much memory is "just right"; why you would choose IDE or SCSI -- that sort of thing if you could.

What kind of load do you feel it will handle before you need to buy or build a second one?

How long do you think it would be before you replaced it with a newer model?

Please feel free to expound or opine on this!


Thank you very much,

Louis

Hi,

I would hardly consider myself anything but a newbie when it comes to the hosting industry, but I would think that what machines you use for hosting depend on what customers you plan to host. Personal low traffic websites would run just fine on a low end cpu system with ide storage. Large businesses or high traffic would require a more complex server with RAID or SCSI options to ensure the highest possible uptime, data integrity, and response time to requests.

Hal

Excellent points...so...

Guess when posting, folks should likely specify the market niche they're thinking the server setup would be ideal for.

I'm actually interested in both ends of the spectrum.

One question I have is...even for small personal and business low resource sites, wouldn't a person be able to handle a much greater number of sites on a SCSI rather than IDE server such that it would pay to go SCSI over IDE?

I've wondered about this...if, for instance a given IDE server could comforatably handle 200 sites, how many could the same box but with the same size SCSI drives, rather than IDE drives handle?


Thanks one and all for sharing,

Louis

I personally believe hard disk size/speed/type means nothing. Sure, on a scsi raid system with a terabyte of data and quad cpu's might be able to handle 100 000 sites, but can your internet connection do so, and will your kernel pack it in?

Personally, I believe the choice of operating system is far more important than hardware. And if you are asking my opinion on operating system, the answer is obvious...FREEBSD!!

*laugh*

I currently host 200 websites on an AMD 1700+, 80 gig hard disk, and yeah, this is my server stats;

6:32AM up 40 days, 22:07, 13 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.02, 0.09

and top;
last pid: 79052; load averages: 0.00, 0.02, 0.09 up 40+22:07:53 06:33:24
194 processes: 2 running, 189 sleeping, 3 zombie
CPU states: 2.4% user, 0.0% nice, 0.8% system, 0.0% interrupt, 96.9% idle
Mem: 261M Active, 539M Inact, 149M Wired, 30M Cache, 111M Buf, 18M Free
Swap: 3550M Total, 4044K Used, 3546M Free


server speed is neither here nor there. Sure, you can host as many sites as you like on nearly any late model i386 based computer, but the fact is, will your internet connection be able to sustain as much bandwidth as your server can serve pages?

I personally think, you only need a super fast computer if you are hosting huge databases and most of your sites are ASP.

Anyways, good luck!

Personally I'd go for dual-CPU's rather than a 'super fast' single CPU. While a faster single CPU is better for games etc, a server can take advantage of both CPU's and reduce the 'wait' time, or efficently run two processes at the same time. This is especially true if you are running scripts, databases etc.

While there is still a performance difference between SCSI and IDE drives, with newer/faster IDE and IDE RAID, IDE is almost becomming a good solution for a webserver. ;)

Also look at throwing an abundance of RAM at it as well. :)

Other than that it really comes down to budget; buy from a 'recognised vender' who offers onsite supporte etc, for your high end machines ... or use a nice 'server motherboard', dual CPU, SCSI drives - if your budget can afford it. Or cut a few more corners if you need to reduce the costs a little. :)