One of my client has a helm cluster and they're hosting their emails, sqls and webs on different servers. At present they have P4 2.8 GHZ (almost 3 years OLD Config) server and hosting about 300 domains on them (HOSTING WEBSITES ONLY - NO EMAIL - NO SQL).

If they upgrade them to the following one... What do you think will be the capacity of the following server?

- 2x Intel Xeon 5420 Quad Core Processors
- Windows 2003 R2 Standard or CentOS Linux
- 4GIG ECC DDR2 RAM (16GIG max)
- 2x 250GIG SATAII HDD

Only sincere comments please !!!

You're most likely going to run into issues with the disk performance. The processors and ram will be great, but you will really lack in disk. Can you switch this to 15K SCSI or SAS drives?

aggreed if you bump up to scsi you will be able to double the accounts on the site. You will want to watch out though because its never good to keep all your eggs in one basket. Even on high performance servers its always better business to keep your accounts lower.

Try and use RAID with your disks too - a server like that will thrash those disks to kindom come. I can guarantee that the first thing you will have problems with is Disk IO.

Having said that - it'll certainly host a whole lot more sites than the current server.

At present they are hosting 300 approximate domains on one P4 servers. They don't have any problem with server speeds ...

Do you think that with RAID/SCSI kind of configuration they can double hosting capacity?