Looking to build a server...

[Scifience]

Well, after paying over $400 last month in hosting bills, I've finally decided to take this over myself. The nice people from Speakeasy are coming to install my line this next week.

This machine will need to serve primarily as a web server. It needs to be very reliable. It will be placed in my home with 100+ year old wiring along with four other computers, so it can't need too much power. The combined sites it is hosting (about 15) get about 3-4,000 unique visitors a day, and about 10-15,000 pageviews. It will need to run Linux, not Windows, so all hardware must work with Gentoo Linux. The sites in question involve quite a lot of file downloading.

My budget is right around $1,000, although this could maybe go slightly higher if necessary. I was looking at an Athlon 64 or Opteron system, but I'll also consider Intel if people think that is better.

Thanks for the input!

 

[Tostada]

Just put Apache on a 486, max out the RAM, get a good UPS...

Seriously, though, I don't see where an Athlon 64 needs to be a priority. For $1000, I think it should be the last priority, far behind storage subsystem, RAM, and power.

How much storage are we talking about for all the sites?

 

[Scifience]

Originally posted by: Tostada
How much storage are we talking about for all the sites?

Right now they're on a 120GB, using about 40GB of it including the Linux install. No RAID or anything right now, but I would like to look into RAID.

 

[Tostada]

$80 XP 2500+ Barton Retail
$65 Biostar M7NCG nForce 2 IGP
$66 x 4 = $264 4 x Hitachi 80GB SATA 8MB 3-year
$168 FastTrack SATA RAID 5
$58 256MB Crucial PC133 CL2
$158 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3200 CL2.5
$189 + $18 = $207 Antec 400W rackmount

$1,000.00 delivered

That RAID-5 card works with RH. You should be able to get it working with GenToo.

I'd still get a good UPS...

 

[Paperlantern]

for a good server, $1000 really isnt much to work with. I work on servers all the time for large companies who all need reliable fast machines. 3-4000 unique hits a day and 15000 page views is heavy traffic, my feeling is that the people who were hosting you probably had daily backups of your site, as well as a RAID volume for further redundancy, in addition they probably had a firewall box in front of all thier servers. For the demands your setup will need i would budget no less than $2000, theres no reason to skimp on sites as heavily trafficed as yours. you may even want to look into something that supports out of the box array SCSI contollers, and with the power situation your in, you may want to consider redundant power supplies, i did a QUICK search and found this

Server

its DESIGNED to web host, now its pricy, but i'm sure you could go with slightly less powerful processor, maybe a little less RAM etc, and shave some bucks off. But for stability and reliablility, you cant go wrong here, plus its rackable, you can put a rack together to hold that, the ups, the firewall, router, everything. In addiiton, these things are a dream to work on, no screws =D

Just a suggestion, if the price limit is ironclad, i hope, and wish you the best of luck in putting together a server that fits your needs, and i'm sorry if i was no help =)

 

[sao123]

Go with

Antec Performance II Series SX1040BII Soho File Server Case (Black) Retail
w/400W Power Supply - $92

and upgrade something else for $100

 

[Tostada]

Paperlantern:

Somehow I find it terribly amusing that you responded by saying he needs to spend more to get a rackmount system with RAID redundancy.

An upper end of 4k visitors a day and 15k pageviews an hour isn't that bad. That's an average of 10 pages a minute, and while there are going to be peaks much higher, it's absolutely not going to strain a budget-conscious system with a Promise RAID 5.

 

[PlatinumGold]

i'm gonna recommend an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 again.

these are great servers, reliable, well built (although a bit heavy) built for the long term.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11215&item=5708897839&rd=1

$465, buy a couple of 18 GB SCSI HD's to plug in and your good to go.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: PlatinumGold
i'm gonna recommend an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 again.

these are great servers, reliable, well built (although a bit heavy) built for the long term.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11215&item=5708897839&rd=1

$465, buy a couple of 18 GB SCSI HD's to plug in and your good to go.

This is certainly a good recommendation, but this part's pretty scary:

Shipping is by truck quote and this will have to be cartoned up and shipped on a pallet/skid.

A dual P2-450 Xeon is good enough, but you'd have to spend a lot to get a SCSI system suitable to hold a site that has a full 40GB of data. He also mentioned power as a concern, and that thing will suck a ton of juice (but honestly, if you're going to have a server in your basement, I think you need to address wiring issues, not try to get low-power servers).

He said he's currently using 40GB of a 120GB drive. It wouldn't be very practical to use 18GB SCSI drives. It's nice that the thing has RAID 5. You could get 4X 36GB Cheetah 10K.6 drives for $560 at NewEgg, or pick up some really old drives at HyperMicro for less.

In the end, it'll be a more legitimate server than anything he could build, but it's still a dinosaur that's pretty outdated and would end up costing quite a bit. It'd be cool to have one, though.

 

[PlatinumGold]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: PlatinumGold
i'm gonna recommend an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 again.

these are great servers, reliable, well built (although a bit heavy) built for the long term.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11215&item=5708897839&rd=1

$465, buy a couple of 18 GB SCSI HD's to plug in and your good to go.

This is certainly a good recommendation, but this part's pretty scary:

Shipping is by truck quote and this will have to be cartoned up and shipped on a pallet/skid.

A dual P2-450 Xeon is good enough, but you'd have to spend a lot to get a SCSI system suitable to hold a site that has a full 40GB of data. He also mentioned power as a concern, and that thing will suck a ton of juice (but honestly, if you're going to have a server in your basement, I think you need to address wiring issues, not try to get low-power servers).

He said he's currently using 40GB of a 120GB drive. It wouldn't be very practical to use 18GB SCSI drives. It's nice that the thing has RAID 5. You could get 4X 36GB Cheetah 10K.6 drives for $560 at NewEgg, or pick up some really old drives at HyperMicro for less.

In the end, it'll be a more legitimate server than anything he could build, but it's still a dinosaur that's pretty outdated and would end up costing quite a bit. It'd be cool to have one, though.

i have one and i love it.

ya, getting used SCSI drives is somewhat risky but probably no more risky than buying new IDE drives. it is raid and it has 6 hot swappable bays, so the ad says there are 3 9 gb scsi drives in it now (18 gb available for OS and such) and then 3 36 GB Drives used will run him about $500.00. would leave him 72 gb for storage using raid 5.

i'd say that's a pretty good solution for a decent price.

 

[Scifience]

Thanks for all of the input.

I should have probably mentioned that I'm 14 and as such don't have a ton of money. This month will be the first month that my sites make a profit (roughly $700), and from looking at my site's income trends, I'm guessing I'll make around $1000 next month. My current hosting contract is through September, so I have a few months to get everything ready.

As much as I love the idea of a rack mountable server, it isn't really practical for me. I don't have any good spots to stick a rack (our house's "basement" is a 125 year old cellar with no outlets).

Most days my sites get around 15,000 page views, but on days when I release a new version of one of my shareware applications that figure can be reached in thirty minutes. At one point I racked up $10,000 worth of bandwidth overages in less than 24 hours (my hosting company at the time charged $0.10 MB). That is one of the main reasons I am doing this; it allows me to control the bandwidth usage better as I will have a line with a set amount of bandwidth and I won't have to worry about overages all the time.

As for pre-made servers, I was looking into a new IBM Opteron server which would run about $1600, but that doesn't have any RAID support built in.

How would a 10K RPM SATA drive (like a Raptor) compare to SCSI these days?

Dell claims that they can sell me a server that can do what I need for $500 - with a Celeron processor, 128MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive. Right....

Any other suggestions are welcome and thanks for all the help!

 

[Tostada]

Raptor 74's are faster in desktop stuff, but as far as web server performance is concerned, a Raptor is about 20% slower than the newest 10K SCSI server drives ... and a Raptor is about 40% faster than a new 7200RPM 8MB SATA drive. That said, you could probably hook up 5400RPM drives to that Promise card with 256MB cache and not have any trouble running a site.

I'm sure there are non-rackmount server cases that have hot-swap cages.

 

[addragyn]

Why not find a host better suited to your needs?

Unless being a host is a skill you want to learn you'll probably get a better return on your time in improving you sites content..

Besides the costs just don't add up. A decent line from Speakeasy, fantastic ISP, plus the hardware, other recurring costs like UPS batteries and then the likelyhood of a debacle from having a server in the basement of your house with a single internet connection. The server is a fixed cost that won't make you money. You have greater upside on what you can make on your site versus what you can save, if any, on hosting costs.

Take a look at ev1.

http://www.ev1servers.net/english/index.asp

And how about some links to your stuff?

 

[Jojo7]

For webservers, the main 2 things that influence performance are the storage interface and the ammount of memory. I would use scsi with as much memory as you can. The cpu doesn't really matter for webserving.

Edit: I agree with addragyn. Not only do you have to deal with everything he said, but you also have the major security issues. I don't know what kind of site you run, but wouldn't it be bad if someone hacked into it or something?

 

[Scifience]

I'm already running a dedicated server at my current host; they provide no support for it. All security, etc. is my responsiblity as it is now.

I already have quite a good deal on a server: $99 a month for Pentium 4 3.0, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD, and 500GB of bandwidth a month. Where it kills me is the bandwidth overages: last month I had $300 in overages.

My other option is just to keep the current plan for the main site and use a server in my house to do only files -> the files are what use most of my bandwidth.

 

[mechBgon]

If you end up looking at SCSI, the LSI Logic 21320R is about $130 at Newegg, including one cable & terminator (it's a dual-channel U320 card, works on PCI-X, 64-bit PCI or 32-bit PCI). It can do RAID1 (or obviously you can do software RAID1 in Linux if you prefer that, at which point you could use any controllers you wanted, SCSI or otherwise).

You can pick up 68-pin 10k SCSI drives with 5-year warranties starting from about $130/$250 for 36/73GB capacities. Hypermicro has some deals on factory-recertified SCSI drives if you don't mind a 1-year warranty. Personally, I do mind. Gimme the brand-new drive in the one-foot cube of egg-crate foam, please

 

[Mike2002]

I was just wondering what type of internet connection you are getting installed with Speakeasy. I'm just curious.

 

[Scifience]

I'm getting 768k for the upload installed on a dry pair.

$125 a month.

 

[Tostada]

I think the fact that you've been getting by with a single 120GB ATA drive for the OS and site should tell you that you probably don't need to worry so much about SCSI.

 

[sao123]

Upload network bandwidth will far outweigh hdd speed in your personal web server...
four 74gb raptors in a raid 5 will be plenty fast enough to host with....

and if you go with that promise card with the expandable ram slot you could probably get away with 4 80gb 7200rpm sata drives with ncq & 8mb cache.

dont forget to have a separate boot drive such as a 36gb raptor.

 

[Sunner]

If you do build it yourself, and take the AMD route, avoid nForce motherboards.
nVidia's Linux support for the nForce chipsets is lackluster to say the least.

 

[Paperlantern]

Originally posted by: Tostada
Paperlantern:

Somehow I find it terribly amusing that you responded by saying he needs to spend more to get a rackmount system with RAID redundancy.

An upper end of 4k visitors a day and 15k pageviews an hour isn't that bad. That's an average of 10 pages a minute, and while there are going to be peaks much higher, it's absolutely not going to strain a budget-conscious system with a Promise RAID 5.

i find it hard to believe you said that, not only am i hurt, regardless of the "wink", but i take this seriously, i do this for a living, and servers are not to be taken lightly, he has some serious traffic, not to mention he said hes making $700 this month, and $1000 the next, thats an incredible amount of growth, if it keeps like that he'll have a hurting unit if he goes with a server comprised of mostly home PC parts, with no firewall, no UPS, nothing. Your setup isnt bad either, but its still has a desktop grade processor, those things arent DESIGNED to be in fo rthe long haul. First time the psu bites the dust and the unit blows out cuz it doesnt have another one to fall back on and he loses an entire day of uptime and hundreds of dollars in sales, plus gets disgusted customers who cant check orders/place orders/use the site (saying this not really knowing the nature of the beast here, lol), all because of a budget server. i'm telling you the ppl he is paying to host his site have a "buttload" of goodies to make sure NOTHING happens to his stuff, and if HE doesnt, he could lose everything, he may even want to add a tape backup. There is NO EXCUSE for chinsing on ANYTHING in a server, especially not one that IS his business, i see hes 14, but hey, hes got more happening then i do on the server end of things, my server consists of an old home PC AMD Thunderbird 850 with 3/4 GIG ram and a 2 10GB HDD's, but i'm not making $1000 a month off of it either, its a lousy personal file server and shoutcast server, its not making me a dime, so i could care less if it went down. seriously though its not like he has to TAKE my advice, but i dont need it crapped on... ""

i agree with addragyn honestly, if he really wants to keep the same level of performance to his site for his customers, he should maybe jsut find a better host *shrugs*, because to keep up with what THEY have, its more than $1000... period

and thats not a bad idea to just use your in home server for FILE serving, instead of hosting as well, will take a load off of it and you can go a little, not too terribly much, but a little less high end on the equipment.

 

[sao123]

yes i agree. in fact you might want to consider an intel chipset, since they seem to have the better driver support under linux than most other chipsets. this of course, requires a pentium processor. Hook up with maybe a pentium 3.

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: Scifience
I'm getting 768k for the upload installed on a dry pair.

$125 a month.

And you are getting a business internet connection with no overages, right?

 

[BurnItDwn]

Dell often has some good deals on their cheap servers (400SC comes to mind ..) ... buy a $400 server from dell, upgrade it to a cheap IDE raid 1 array (2 x 120GB drives would be perfect), buy another 256 or 512MB of extra ECC DDRAM and a dvd burner or SCSI tape backup .. and you will have a very stable box under your budget.

If you wanna do it yourself ... I'd think to go with Asus or Tyan for the motherboard (mostly due to their reputations)
I would think a VIA chipset would be preferred over an nvidia chipset due to the whole Nvidia Drivers not being open source issue
Maybe an Asus A7V600-X would fit the bill (for around $70)
Then I'd recommend going with an AthlonXP 2500 Mobile and run it at the stock speed. This will allow the CPU to run nice and cool and use slightly less power.
If the sites you host involve big databases ... got a LOT of ram, if they are just static html websites ... 256MB is plenty. if its a mix, 512 or 1024MB should be fine.

Now IMO, you have 4 very good options you can go with on the hard drives (in order of cost)
Sure there are other combos ... 1+0 or ide raid 5 (even though its generally slow)
a) IDE Raid 1 ... any cheap IDE Raid card will work, even a $20 card. Get 2 decent sized drives, and you are set.
This would be the best bang for the buck while still at a very stable and decent performing level option. This is what I recommend. The major downside to this option, is that you will most likely have to replace dead drives every year or two with IDE, where as the other options will generally be more reliable.

b) SATA Raid 1 ... get a SATA raid card and a pair of 74GB raptors. They have a nice warranty, and will be quicker than the regular drives (however, I don't think the speed of the drive is very important here though as even if you got 15,000 pageviews every hour, that is still only about 4.2 per second.

c) SCSI Raid 1 ... any U160 SCSI raid card should work great for this ... 2 x 73GB drives in 1, or 4 x 36gb drives in 1+0 would be fine. This will offer great speed and redundancy. since power is a concern however, be warned that 10k and 15k drives do take slightly more power to spin (probably negligable amount though).
I think 2 x 73GB 10k scsi drives is your second best option. This will have plenty of speed and be extremely reliable. SCSI drives are pretty much designed to take a pounding and keep on ticking.

d) SCSI raid 5 ... any decent U160 SCSI raid card should work great for this ... you would need at least 3 x 36GB drives in raid 5 for your storage requirements. Raid5 is very nice, however low end software raid cards will be extremely CPU dependant, and cause the system to crawl. So it would be necessary to not scrape from the bottom of the barrel.


I am not going to suggest IDE raid 5 since it costs as much for a quality hardware IDE raid card as a SCSI one, and if you are going to invest that kinda money on the card, may as well go with SCSI. one final note: do not get a software raid card and run raid 5. All the parity calculations will be offloaded to the CPU and it will be just like the pre-DMA times. verrrry slow and verrrry CPU intensive to write data.