My host, RackShack.net, is running a limited-time upgrade promotion on all AMD Duron 1 Ghz servers (like my own), offering a new motherboard and 1.7 Ghz Celeron for a one-time fee of $169. That's certainly a good thing, but would my money be better spent if I purchased an additional 512 MB of RAM (giving my box 1 GB of total memory)? The extra RAM would cost $228 per year. Which upgrade would increase the performance of my server, which hosts MySQL/PHP intensive websites, the most?

Without knowing more about your current and expected server load it is hard to advise. How much swapping to the disk does the system do now?

Run a program like this to see:
http://www.widexl.com/scripts/server-info/index.html
http://www.monster-submit.com/servercheck/

I'd go for the ram. A 1ghz processor is still pretty powerful for a webhosting server. I think people often get the impression they need gaming desktop grunt for serving webpages when they don't.

Greg Moore

I would upgrade the RAM to 1GB first, before the processor, if you are only choosing one upgrade option.

Alan

First check the average load on you server and then check the swap file used through vmstat. If average load is high enogh go for the cpu upgrade otherwise go for the RAM upgrade. If you do not have swap file usage you can think of no upgrade at all.