home server question

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11 Jul 2005
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Hey all,

pretty much am looking to send my home server to a DC because i want to host a site on it, your probably thinking paying £50+ a month just to run a website is overkill but i have a good few reasons but thats not my question :D

would you say a P4 6series 3.0GHz with HT and 512mb of DDR2 ram ok to run 1 website with a fair amount of visitors? its not particullarly heavy website but will use 1 maybe 2 sql databases for client area's. if your wondering how many visitors maybe 1000 a day tops

thanks again

Angelos
 
Yeah, that'll be fine. Web sites used to run before Core2Duos came around.

Although I'd suggest running a LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP] for it - less chance someone will crack it open like a cheap pinata, and less chance that it will fall over at an inopportune time.

Worry more about power supply to the machine and network kit [simple UPS is will do], the quality of the network connection, and making sure no-one else accidentally turns the machine off or tries to play online poker on it - the hardware specs are fine really.

Shouldn't need to make the machine a Domain Controller, unless you specifically want to use AD to control user groups, which is silly - I guess you just want a usable version of IIS and the ability to have more than 10 connections at once, etc...
 
well as i said in the orginal post the server is going to a DC so will have UPS with 3TB b/w a month, connected at 100mb so b/w and power shouldnt be a problem. also i get a nice SLA so all is good there, pretty much its for a new company my self and my father are starting, so just wanted to make sure that even with the fairly older machine specs the site should run fine, it will literally be the only thing on there.

Angelos
 
Ah, you're sorted then, yeah, it'll be fine. Might be worth getting a 2 or 4gb matched RAM kit should you want to add more stuff to it though - say, a POP/SMTP server, or similar. RAM is cheap, so why not?

Still a bit confused about the DC - or do you mean data centre?

Mixing up 'windows', 'server' and the phrase 'dc' is not good - DC in WindowsServerLand = Domain Controller which is completely unecessary for running IIS or Apache on Windows, etc.

Incidentally, what you doing for storage and backup - local disks, or do the datacentre give you space on a SAN? Got it all sorted? If they offer to take backups, get proof they are taking them, and make sure you keep offsite copies of everything.
 
yeh sorry bout that i did mean data centre, hehe. ermm in regards to backups as its only a website ill be taking weekly backups to my home server. the only thing i was worried about was the ram/cpu, its got a WD raptor in there aswell so i might aswell get 2-4gb ram for it, its only 1 site right :D
 
Add a chunky HD, use that for backups locally, then FTP/rsync the backups down from the new/slower disk over Thar Interwebnets.

TBH if it's a single raptor, I'd be tempted to replace it with two dirt cheap normal drives - yes, a raptor can do more commands a second, but with two cheap drives in a RAID mirror, if one dies, you just get a perky email from the machine letting you know that it's now running off the 'mirror' disk and to replace the 'master', rather than no website till the disk gets repaired!

Might be overkill, but better that than the site going down unexpectedly :)
 
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