My new server ROCKS!
 

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2006/09/5.jpg

Dual Core 3200mhz 2x2mb cache / 5060
( Intel 5060 2 x 2M 3.2 GHz 1066 MHz FSB )
4gb memory
146gb x 2 10k 3.5" SAS drives
Redundant power supply
Perc 5/i RAID controller

Wow, what a difference some new hardware can make. Right off the bat all my sites are much more reponsive and my # of users online is nearly double. With 600+ users on my forums the speed boost from my older Dell 2650 is very noticible.

ooooh (drools...)

Quite the sexy server ya got there.

Those drives probably set you back a bit. Still cool. Beats my home server: 2.53 GHz Celeron D, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD (+500 GB secondary). Behold the might of $200.

I'm guessing yours was...$4500?

Yeah thats a nice server. How many are hosted on it and what is your usual server load?

$4500 is right on. I've been watching the Dual Core prices and there was just a drop that made me comfortable making the purchase. (Just two months ago they were in the $6k range). Funny to see the OS reporting 8 processors. I needed to upgrade from ES3 to ES4 since they are dropping support and getting a new server minimized my downtime; as it was I was only offline for about 30-45 minutes.

I have a dozen sites on it; three vB forums with about 1,000 users online concurrently, a radio station and unknown number of users on the others. Load so far has been around 1; the older server ran about a 2. Throught the day I put out about 3.5mb/sec.

damn thats pretty sweet keeping a nice server load too. Im looking into getting something or taking my old dual core and turning into a server. I rent one now but I would rather have it sitting right here next to me and not having to pay the rent.

I CoLo at a secure facility; I just provide the hardware and have a 10mb pipe with no bandwidth limitations. I have fiber at home but I'm limited to 2mb upstream so hosting home here isn't practical (although I run a machine here that feeds my radio server).

Nice - I built my server with company funds (around $400 and a used case) - but free hosting and all the bandwidth I could ask for. We too have a 10mb pipe, and the only DS3 in town, and looks like we're fixing to triple the pipe as we're starting to peak (we've added 300 cable modem subscribers in the past 3 months). I don't have fiber at home but I am 4mb/1mb on cable. That's a nice rig - something I'd like to have one day :P Perhaps when our company gets larger and my influence grows with it.

I'm still deciding whether to rent a dedicated server when the time comes or colocate. I'm worried in either case because of two reasons:

• The break-even point from buying the hardware and paying for the colocation versus renting a dedicated server is probably pretty high, meaning only a really powerful server (like yours) would be efficient to colocate versus rent
• I have a good working knowledge of administering Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Linux in general, but not from a security standpoint--that is, I can write secure code in PHP and MySQL, but I don't have enough experience making Apache, MySQL, the OS itself, etc. secure against attack. Shared hosting is good for that because teams of professionals with years of experience are doing that for me.