Hey there fellow CCCommunications members,

I'm planning on opening a hosting "company" and am at the point of purchasing HardWare for the main hosting box.
Have quite some experience with software-side, but when it comes to hardware... Need some help/advice...

So, Ive been cruising around the net, picked some stuff, leme know what you think:

Motherboard:
Gigabyte EX58-UD3R
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... uctID=2989

CPU:
Intel Core i7 920
http://www.intel.com/products/processor ... ations.htm

RAM:
Corsair DDR3 2x2GB @ 1600MHz

HDD:
WD Caviar Green, 500GB, 7200rpm, 32MB, SATAII

I could have gone totally off the right path so therefore kindly ask for an advice.

Also, one more specific question...
Are the ECC RAM modules much better than the normal ones (server-wide)? The price for them seems crazy...

Those components you've listed seem primarily focused at consumers rather then server applications.

All of the Wintel servers I manage are Xeon boxes, typically running 1-2 cpu's (quad core these days), ECC RAM, dual power supplies, UPS's, Serially Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives running in RAID 1 for OS drive/critical data. Mission critical services _always_ have redundant hardware, sometimes using clustering, sometimes as a failover (secondary DNS/split DHCP scopes that sorta thing)

Have you given any thought to risk management? If one of my customers has an outage that exceeds SLA's, it costs lots of $$$ to reimburse for potential lost business/productivity.

Are you looking for a rack-mount solution or standalone cases? Server hardware is crazy expensive unfortunately. Try checking out Dell or HP servers, I've purchased both in the past and have been happy with both vendors. Well... the HP sales guy didn't add hard drives or caddys to the invoice (idiot!) but the hardware was great.

Web hosting isn't the most hardware intensive service either. Depending on your customers needs, you could probably get away with the last generation servers to save some money, or perhaps buy from eBay.

Having said all this, it really depends on what your business requirements are and that's for you to decide

Thanks for the reply,
don't get me wrong, I'm not to compare to any huge companies, the hosting I'll be making will start low, with one standalone hosting box (which doesn't need to be a huge thing), if the demand is well, I will consider buying Rack servers, high performance.
If you had UPS, RAID in mind, I'll consider RAID a bit later on, UPS will be added, just didn't list it above, didn't seem important for me... Dont think I can miss to much there

In short, my budget is low, and am looking for the best performance possible for up to about 800$. Server will run cPanel, sql, Apache, WHM and thats roughly pritty much it. And therefore the server hardware (ECC,Raptor disks,...) isn't currently something I'm after.

Checing ebay now

g3c0 wrote:Checing ebay now

You can pick up a Dell Poweredge 1850 on eBay with specs around 3.0GHz Xeon and 4GB ECC RAM, up to 2x 10k rpm 130Gig SCSI drives for around $600-$1000AUD.

A little older, and unable to run 64-bit VM's from a hypervisor, but still a good piece of hardware.

Jimmeh wrote:

g3c0 wrote:Checing ebay now

You can pick up a Dell Poweredge 1850 on eBay with specs around 3.0GHz Xeon and 4GB ECC RAM, up to 2x 10k rpm 130Gig SCSI drives for around $600-$1000AUD.

A little older, and unable to run 64-bit VM's from a hypervisor, but still a good piece of hardware.

Even Servers from Dell Direct are around that price.

Hi Mate,

Im unsure on the work loads that your server is going to need to support but I would strongly suggest getting a second hand server off Ebay as Jimmy has suggested or have a look on the Dell website below for their refurbished servers.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/enterpris ... =dfb&cs=28

One of the problems that you might run into using the hardware that your looking at is relialibity because that hardware will not be designed for constant thrashing like server hardware can handle. Again it comes down to the loads that are going to be on the server but I also think that you will get a lot more performance out of a second hand server than you will out of new consumer hardware.

I also think that having a UPS is a must as well because im sure that your customers wont be to happy if your servers are restarting just because of the power flickering or something like that. The UPS will also protect your hardware a lot more from power surges and stuff like that.

What do you have planned for the software side? Are you going to be running a hypervisor of some sort?

If you have any other questions about anything or need a hand getting it up and running post them up.

Just today I was thinking if there would be much money in webhosting services so you will have to let us know how it goes for you mate.

Thenks a lot for replies, really helpfull...

So, basicly consumer hardware is out... Listened to your advice guyz and spend some time on ebay searching Dell PowerEdges, found some interesting boxes. Let me know what you think about:

Dell PowerEdge 2800 | DUAL 3.0GHz Intel Xeon | 6GB ECC DDR2 | 3x73GB @ 10k rpm SCSI HDD
EBAY ITEM LINK:
http://tiny.cc/Nv46I
sorry for the german language, Germany's ebay is the biggest one close to my country...
The product price: 850 AUD

The software:
CentOS 5
Apache 2.2
MySQL 5.1
Proftpd
cPanel & WHM 11 - Only basic statistics from cpanel will be used. Was thinking of creating my own control panel, will see how it goes...

DNS server and backups will be on another box, want to keep that seperated from this one.

I'm not planning to use any virtualisation.

The work loads are unkown to tell you the truth, I have about 8 customers that will buy hosting at its launch, from that on, I'm hoping for best... So, like I said above, on bigger demand I'll buy a new box, I need this hosting box just to start off my hosting, cover the netline costs, electricity and payout the box over a period of time.

Oh and net connection is at the moment: Optic fiber 50mbit/s , again, will increase if needed, fiber connection is cheap as hell anyway here in Slovenia hehe

Thenks again for helping...

Good to hear that your looking at a Dell box now. They really are great machines from what I have seen and I have used a few different models and they all are great machines. That box will be fairly well suited to what you need and will run quite well i think. The only thing is that it only has 73GB HDD's. Are you going to use RAID5 over that for a bit of redundancy because that will drop your storage to a total of 146GB but it looks like you have fairly small customers so and if your not using them as a file store then it might be ok.

I have not used any of that software before so dont know anything about it. I have only used small-medium business level software.

Drop us a line if you look at heading down the virtualisation path because im a huge fan of the benifits of using the technology and would be happy to help out where I can.

You got 50MB connection to your house? We struggle to get 16-18MB at the best of times. We are waiting on a new broardband network so that should be good when it comes in.

Keep us updated on how things are going with it. Sounds like the plans are coming together for you mate.

What do you think about:
http://cgi.ebay.com/GOOGLE-SEARCH-SERVE ... 0.m14#shId

?

Seems weird cheap to me ^^ and bumps me "WE DO NOT HAVE PASSWORD"

If I get your approoval I'm buying this 1 definately

Have you thought about buying/renting a dedicated box in a data centre and reselling that. I have dozens of customers and domains out there that are on "my" equipment. It would save a LOT of heart ache if something goes wrong with the hardware and if you are not considering RAID and off site backup that is exactly what you will have.

At least you could get a feel for the market before you wasted a load of $$$.

Regards