building a server

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dethangel

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hey im building a server (for web hosting) and i dont have $10,000 to pay for parts, i was just wondering if, for the money, these parts would be good enough for a server:

maxtor7200 rpm, 200GB hard drive $194
P4 2.4GHz with 533MHz fsb $164
Matsonic M59337C MOBO $51

up to 4 GB of ram

or

fujitsu 10,000 rpm, 73GB hard drive $335
Xeon 2.4GHz w/ 400MHz fsb $230
E7500 for dual Xeon MOBO $485

up to 12 GB of ram

i will probably initially use the same amount of ram for both, which is PC2100

basically what i want to know is is there going to be a huge, noticeable difference between the two as far as for web hosting (a big enough difference to justify the difference between $409 and $1050 for these 3 parts
 
If your site isn't getting tons of traffic, I bet you'd be hard pressed to notice any kind of a difference between the two. The Xeon is mainly meant for really intense processing applications or very busy servers with thousands of hits in a short period of time. If you're just starting out, though, it would probably not be worth that much extra $$.. besides, you can always upgrade later ;)
 
I agree with paradox, you certainly don't need a xeon processor system to start out with. Your sites aren't going to get enough traffic right off the bat to warrant that, and assuming that you aren't going to do this for free, you can upgrade later once you have made some $$..

However, to give you serious specifics, I need more information about what you intend to host. Is this going to be strickly website hosting? are you going to include a public FTP? what scripting are you going to allow (PHP, CGI, ASP, ActiveX, etc.)? will you be offering an SQL database? What OS are you going to use? What backup system are you planning?

To the basics.... If this is going to be a straight website with no public FTP and you aren't going to allow "adult" content, and you aren't going to use it for personal use as well. I would say that the processor (P4 2.4) would be fine. Ram (as always) is important, get as much as you can. However, for fault tollerance, I would go with several smaller drives, maybe 3 80Gb and set up a Raid 5. Raid 5 offers good fault tollerance without much loss in performance. Although, setting up a RAID of this type will require a Raid controller that supports RAID 5. A good raid controller can be purchased for about $50. I dropped the size because you shouldn't need to give any customer more than 100-200mg of space for a website. I have created many websites with various usage and have never needed anything more than that, even with ebusiness applications, and lots of images. People who need more than that, either have a HUGE site (like Microsoft.com or Amazon.com) with video files available, or don't know what they are doing.

The other option that you have is burning off backups on CDs about every other day, or every third day. That can get expensive very quickly, and would very soon end up with costing much more than if had you gone with the RAID originally. However, you are gonna need to do one or the other. Customers don't look very highly on their web host losing all of their website data, and can lead to lawsuits if you don't have some kind of backup or fault tollerance setup.

As far as the OS is concerned... Use Linux. I'm not a fan of using linux for home use, but we aren't talking about home use here. It is most likely the best server side OS available (barring big name OS like Unix). For serving applications, Apache with MySQL (if you are going to offer databasing).

If you need more info, let me know.

Alexander
 
The Linux server IS the best server!

It has got CHMOD (I need that...!) and NO VIRUSSES!
 
well, could i run 2 120GB hdd in raid 0 and use the 2nd one for a backup?

what implanning on doing is setting up a web hosting business, where im just hosting local sites, i will sell people any amount of space they want (there will be a per-mb charge) ill prolly do my pricing something like this

5mb for $5 a month
20mb for $10 a month
50mb for $15 a month
100mb for $25 a month
200mb for $40 a month
500mb for $80 a month
1gb for $150 a month

(the larger figures would be for sites with music or videos)
i will edit more later
 
Not with only 2 drives.. Basically, with a Raid setup, is that you have two physical drives but only one logical drive. To put that in laymans terms. When you go into "My Computer" it will show that you only have one drive that is 240Gb in size. You would have to have a 240Gb drive to backup the other two.. Or setup a third drive with Raid 5 and you can rebuilt the data if one of the drives fails.

The pricing looks good, but you will definately not need over 120- 160Gb to start out with.

By the time you outgrow that, You'll need to build an actual eServer to provide the level of throughput and support that would be necessary.

Alexander
 
so i should get 3 smaller dirves and set them up in raid 5? that would give me one big drive and 1 smaller one? cause then i could back up my big one to the small one (cuz i prolly wont have more than one drives worth of site stuff, i just want to have plenty of room for my server software/os) im also trying to decide between T1 and just cable, the cable in wichita is really good, but i dont know if that would be fast enough, what do you guys think? should i just get cable for now and get T1 when i get my better server? also what os should i go with, should i go with linux/apache (linux is less of system hog right?) or windows 2000 server and a windows-based server program?
 
so if i go with linux, i wont really need that powerful of a computer for a server is what you are saying, correct?
 
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