I like to play with hardware. And I'm curious as to ATS's configuration.

William,

Could you give us the hardware configuration for the server?

Clock speed, front side bus speed,
installed memory type, disk array type,
processor(s) type, motherboard manufacturer, network adapter, etc.

It's a stock machine provided by a rack-space machine provider. P4, 2GHz, 1Gig RAM, Linux, 7200rpm HD, etc.

We're looking at upgrading to a Dual-Xenon, ultra-wide SCSI sometime soon (need enough cash first).

at Rackspace. They normally run different specials every month. I just leased a 2.8gHz Xeon, 1GB RAM, 3-36GB RAID5 SCSI...$700 a month.

Yikes, thats damn expensive, you could have gotten a much better deal for half as much with our webhost, EV1 Servers.net.

my business can't be down. I have a guaranteed 2 hour hardware replacement and they have been up for 30 months with no interuption in service. I also had to go with Windows because of proprietary software. I did check out the ATS host, they do have some of the best prices I have seen.

The problem/advantage with EV1 is that they're unmanaged servers... the prices are great, but you need to be able to manage the machine yourself.

$700 a month??????? DAMN!!!!!!!!

Sounds like a decent setup but that is nuts.

Good sounding setup there William. A dual Xenon would be good, but watch out for the Xenon processors if you intend on overclocking. They have some drawbacks, the worst being that when overclocked even by a little, the life expectancy decreases dramatically (by half or more). I am an AMD fan. I have set up overclocked AMDs numerous times with absolutely no drawbacks. As long as the heatsink and fan systems keep them cool, they will run forever.

I can get a dual 2GHz Xenon with 1gig RAM, and some fast drives for slightly under $300/mo at EV1... that's also with 700gig of monthly bandwidth.

Not bad.

That's a reasonable price, especially with the 700gig bandwidth. That's where the money goes anyways. The system is probably actually about 100 a month and 200 for the bandwidth. Good deal William.

Just thinking out loud...

I would think that even with scsi 320 that you would run into a bottleneck
at the adapter level with dual xeon. Could you put half the tables on one array and
the other half on another array, with its own adapter?

Also, you have to be careful when leasing from a hosting company. They tend to
use drives that have low on board cache. 2mb vs. 8mb can make a big difference.
Also, the adapters they choose are often sub-par, and most likely not on a pci-x
slot.

Another approach to hosting...

Custom build the server. Set it up at a collocation center and pay for bandwidth used.


[Edited on 26-9-2003 by kukla]

[Edited on 27-9-2003 by kukla]