I'm dropping my dual Xeon 1.6Ghz in favor for a dual opteron 265... hoping that'll speed things up a bit.

Dual 1.6GHZ xeons?!!

Yup... with the help of many to tweak them as much as possible, but I think I've finally reached their max capacity, so we acquired some new bits to upgrade from the dual xeons to dual dual-core opterons.

I have moved from Dual Xeons to Dual Operons at LiquidWeb

Here are my specs...

2400 GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth (1200in + 1200out)
Dual CPU + Dual Core Opteron 265
8GB DDR Registered ECC
Dual 36GB SCSI / Hardware Raid 1
Linux - CentOS 4 (x86_64)
Cpanel
50 GB Remote Backup.

Becuase of the CentOS 64 Bit I have had some issues (I can load APC or EAcellerator) but everything else is working fine.

EVA (George) helped me out a few weeks ago on my configuration files and now I am quite happy.

I am a very busy board with 1700+ online durring most of the day (60 min cookie timeout)

LiquidWeb also offers colocation and I am looking into this, as If I purchased my own server and colcated it with that I would be saving $600 a month which would pay for the server quick.

http://www.liquidweb.com/colocation/plan2/

Anyone know of some decent places online to shop for servers?

I would probably have the same config however have larger drives (and probably go with a SATA Raid setup instead of SCSI, and would probably drop down to 6 gig of ram instead of 8 as of now I am only using about 3 gig of ram and the rest is just sitting there.

I use to be with the planet but dropped them as they screwed me over when I ordered a second server, which when I spoke with them on the phone they said they could locate it in the same datacenter and cross connect my servers together...

I didn't realize this was not done until I checked my stats after having the new server for 2 weeks and found out I was way over my bandwidth for the month. I +++++ed and moaned to get it moved and they said sorry for the fact I was told on the phone I could get them in the same data center but they never guarenteed it, so then I threatened to cancel and they suddenly found a way to move my server to the correct datacenter but it was going to cost me $400. I asked if I could use my allotment of support time I was given each month (and NEVER used in the 2 years I was a customer) and they told me no, so I shopped around and found LiquidWeb, canceled theplanet and never looked back (and have been very happy with LiquidWeb)

Anyways back to my question anyone know when I can shop online for decent servers at decent prices? :)

Thanks

I'm currently dealing with:

softlayer.com

The customer manager is:

Mary Hall
mhall@softlayer.com

I've known her for a few years now and she's moved from ThePlanet to SoftLayer! :) I'm going to move to softlayer... Shall keep people posted...

Unfortunately, softlayer does not offer SCSI at all at this time (confirmed via email). Once they start offering that (hopefully 15K drives), I'm sure they will catch a lot more of the big boys.

Again, I'd like to ask how many of you with dual processors (or more) are really CPU bound? IMHO it's mostly about raid setup, SCSI vs SATA, hard drive speed and RAM. The dual opterons definitely seem to outperform the XEONs, but I think we are missing the forest for the trees if you get all excited about faster CPUs without understanding that the rest of the system can be much more important.

-vissa

Thanks Erwin, I've been looking around for other server companys off and on. I'll definatly take a look at softlayer :)

You are correct that softlayer doesn't offer SCSI - however, I intend to get 10k Raptors with RAID 0 - surely they are not that bad that they become the bottleneck? What do people think?

I haven't kept up on harddrive issues, however one of the benifits of scsi was its onboard controler that did the work so that the cpu(s) didn't. I do not believe that SATA has that controler, but its just overall faster. Perhaps I'm wrong?

Edit: Were having a server thats going though a mass of bandwidth, might considering switching it, or the other site we (my client) have on it to one of these single dual core machines. And I'd like to move some of our eggs out of the basket. They also have a large chunk of expandable bandwidth for a decent price. Anyone know what their network is like?

The beauty of softlayer is that they have a complete backend private network that your servers automatically link to - so all your servers are automatically networked - if you want to add more servers to the network, it's as easy as just getting another server. Much easier than having a rack etc.