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Originally Posted by emmanuelle
I respectfully disagree. We've learned the hard way that equipment can only take so much before they roll over and beg for mercy. Scripts, stats, htaccess mods and mail all place a heavy burden on the box, hampering performance and experience for your members. Since they pay the bills, they deserve the very best you can give them.
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OK then tell me why my surfing experience is no different then it was 2 or 3 years ago? The internet is not getting slower nor is the speed of any of the boxes. But yet my surfing is the same. When I find a site that loads really slow but yet the page size is really small, I "who is" only to find most of the time they are with a host that tosses 500 virtual on one beefy box and that’s just stupid. 99% of the time the servers resources sit idol. There are some differences between a server and your home computer. Most noticeable is duel processor which, no a days is not uncommon to see in a person’s home box along with raid. But they are in essence the same thing. Your home computer will most likely be running more software then a server would. But the main problem you are going to find is the people who set up the server. They don’t know that you can assign processes to 1 of the processors. That’s why servers come with multiples. You have one processor manage your site performance and another manages your other jobs. This way the site’s processor is not taxed while the other stuff is running. Of course you need beefy ram. I would recommend no less then 1 gig these days and even that’s on the low end. My old box had 3 gigs and ran like an ass whipped horse. If you’re running windows check out your task manager and look over the performance of your computer. The only time I have seen systems spike in memory and processor usage is when there is something wrong with the box or they are running a DB and those should be on a box all by themselves. But for serving up web pages; I agree that systems can only take so much but I bet you were trying to run a boat load of things on one box. Mail should run on 1 box not the system you are hosting your site on. That’s why in my experience it's best to buy 3 or 4 smaller cheaper systems and cluster them. Have each box manage certain things and the cluster only comes into play when the system gets taxed. Web servers are no different then corporate ones you see in a company intranet. But you don’t see companies buying 1 server for their whole environment. What you say is 100% correct and I'm not arguing with you here. I'm just saying buying the biggest newest box is most of the time a waste. You can end up paying $500 per month for the thing and in most cases you can get 1/2 the specs of a new box for around $125 to $150. Which would allow you to get two boxes and still save $$.. Heck you can get 3.
The cluster will out perform the $$ box and you will rarely have down time on your site. The company I was with was
www.fastservers.net and one nice thing the company has is server auctions. You can bid on servers people are no longer using and in most cases you can get them cheap (no one wants a used box LOL) but my 2nd two servers I had gotten this way and was paying $75 per month for them. They were 2.0 ghz with 1 gig ram and 300 gigs of HD and nice thing was I still got 900 gigs of BW of which the company just recently changed to 1500 gigs on outbound only (for cam sites thats a big deal, 300 hosts pushing streams to the box and it counts on your BW sucks). When I had my box the only thing I had running on it was the website. I left all my domains mail forwarded to my personal email through directnic. I bought 2 other smaller boxes. 1 for my DB and 1 for my stats and ftp remote back up etc. But that's just me I would never buy state of the art for anything..