Most datacenters have a hardware stock you can purchase if something dies. The most common failures are fans and hard drives. If your motherboard dies, you would need to have one drop shipped in and just pay for remote hands to install it.

With hard drives, most RAID controllers support running a hot spare. So you can have a hot spare incase a drive dies giving you the ability to suffer two drive failures in a RAID5 configuration.

I just got a dual opteron dual core 270, with 8gb ram, 4x150gb raptor on raid 5 over at softlayer.com great guys. i defiently suggest you guys try them out for anyone looking at a opteron

Because the TCO of co-located servers are insane.

A post of mine from BBA about the TCO for one of my clients

The user I was talking with required less than 200gb of bandwidth a month, And thinking about it now I didn't take into account un-metered bandwidths (the throughput plans, but those are just as costly).

I must also say his arguments were vastly flawed due to the fact he didn't take into account the original build cost for a server, added into his monthly bills. However, my post is still valid.

I've found in most cases that server load/capacity is generally IO limited. In other words -- hard drives, raid, etc. Lots of RAM helps a lot in caching the data. So does going from a Dual Xeon to 4/8 Opterons really make any difference if the limiting factor is your hard drive/raid speed?

-vissa

You'll find a double 246 4 GB RAM for 150 € on www.hetzner.de, but you maybe want to add RAID for 30 € more.

sweet.... looks like you have room to grow there :)

we use iweb. great service. they don't offer opterons but went out and bought us one to see if all this thread is true. if so, they will add it to their packages. can't rave enough.

just moved to a dual-operton server, we're flyin' now - btw, what's a healthy server load?

Preferably <1.0 for each processor, however, load can get much higher before things really get bad. Honestly, I've yet to see any real marker for when you'll start to have real problems. I've had machines of the same setup differ wildly - One machine will be fine at 10, and the other will have things failing at 6-7, running the same programs to test the stability.

If you're spiking up to 5 for shorts amount of time under heavy traffic, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Theoretically, you should be able to handle that much constantly, but some would question how healthy that is on parts of the machine, especially the hard drives, depending on what's being used that's causing the issue. If you're hitting higher than 5 for more than a few minutes at a time, I'd seriously suggest trying to figure out why that's happening, specificly, and seeing what you can do to optomize the server.

And load isn't always the best guide - Depending on what's causing it, you might see no performance degredation with 20, 30, or even higher.

While load is a good way a lot of the time to check the overall status of the server at a glance, looking at actual CPU and MEM usage is much better.

lol
is there same price at some international place ?

BR,
Ross