I am transitioning away from a telus line which has served me well for a number of years. Of course my primary business activity was *not* hosting. The leased server though is the best bang for the buck, though you will probably learn more with your own hardware.
This is not meant as flame bait, but just my personal experience and opinion. Software RAID I find difficult to justify with low cost of some of the new ATA/SATA cards. A basic 3ware card can be had for as low as $189.95 (memory express) so the performance and hassle of software RAID is simply not worth $200 (for me). The hassles I have experienced are usually due to upgrades and or misc software glitches. Most of my servers have not needed to be reinstalled to be upgraded, so I like solutions that are resilient the upgrade process and potentially broken packages. For a server OS Debian has been very good at incremental upgrades. The take home message is that the cost difference does not justify the potential administrative overhead, the very thing that RAID is supposed to reduce. On the windows side I have a couple of clients where the software mirror just stops working. With windows many boot disks and recovery tools do not support software RAID configurations, so you are limiting yourself there. I have not had to replace or completely reinstall a server as a result (yet) but I have not been all that comfortable with it since most of the errors were software and not hardware related. It looks to be a case of unnecessarily complicating something that is done easily (and well) in hardware. On Wed, 2005-08-06 at 14:31 -0600, Steven Kay wrote: > Thanks for the help. When you say the software raid has caused you a lot > of problems, what kinda problems has it caused you? Hard to set up? Not > reliable? The Raid controllers are really expensive and I wanted to > avoid purchasing one if possible but I still wanted to maintain some > redundancy for if a hard drive were to crap out. > > I had a few other questions. > > If later on I wanted to use this server (the dell 420c) for say a > regular office machine, or to play some games on. Would it be > possible/practicle to do so. > > Also if I do choose to get my own server would a regular business/server > telus line be enough to do the hosting? 1Mbps Upstream and 2.5 Mbps > downstream? I'm guessing not but..... > > I'm going to look more into leased servers and see if that's the path I > should take. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Gustin Johnson > Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 1:57 PM > To: CLUG General > Subject: Re: [clug-talk] OT: Server Advice/ Help > > > Everyone has their own story when it comes to servers. Some of my > thoughts are below. As usual, your mileage may vary. > > I am beginning to transition to leased servers now. I find it more cost > effective than using my own hardware, especially on bandwidth costs. For > a little over $100 CDN I can get both the server and the bandwidth (1000 > Gigs per month on a 10 Mbit pipe). > > Of course I will still maintain servers in town for backup (LDAP, SQL, > /etc/ and some user data), but most of my cost is the bandwidth ($140+ > CDN for a weak telus pipe). My local servers are actually older > workstations with 3ware RAID cards. The load on the Athlon 1400Mhz right > now is: 0.08, 0.15, 0.17 and is serving email to ~300 users, 2 blog > sites, a webmail frontend, and a SSL web site. I will saturate the > bandwidth long before I strain the actual hardware. > > I would also stay away from software raid, it has caused me more grief > over the years than it has saved (both the linux LVM and Windows > equivalent). > > As for local places selling cheap servers, you can get an account at > various places like LaTech, GCS, White Knight, PE, there are quite a > few. Where you save in purchasing locally (Dell is hard to beat) is in > not paying the shipping fees, as well as gaining greater control over > the final configuration. Memory Express is also quite reasonable. > > Also, from what you described, I would get the cheaper server and load > it up with RAM, as opposed to the server with a second CPU option. > > On Tue, 2005-07-06 at 23:38 -0600, Steven Kay wrote: > > I am looking to purchase a cheap entry level server. I plan to use it > > as a webserver to host 2 postnuke sites and another download site > > which will get about 1000 gig per month downloaded from it. Price and > > expandibility are very important. Below I mention a few that I have > > been looking at. Are there any places around calgary where you can get > > > cheap servers? What do you think of the ones I mentioned below? Are > > they overkill or not enough? This is my first time around with > > something like this so any opinions would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks. > > > > > > So far the only place I've found cheap servers is dell. I've been > > looking at the dells. > > > > The one I especially had my eye on was the > > > > PowerEdge SC1420 > > --------------------------- > > IntelR XeonT 2.80 GHz (another processesor can be added later on) > > 2 40 gig sata drives (i'm going to use software raid 1) > > 512MB, 400MHz, 2X256MB, SINGLE RANK > > Onboard nic > > > > I liked this one (the sc1420,above) because later on I was thinking I > > might need to drop another processor in there for more power. But it > > costs a few hundred buck more. > > > > And another option I was looking at was the > > > > > > PowerEdge SC420 > > ------------------------------------------ > > IntelR PentiumR 4 2.80 GHz > > 2 40 gig sata drives (i'm going to use software raid 1) > > 512MB, 400MHz, 2X256MB, SINGLE RANK > > Onboard nic > > > > > > > > > > > > No virus found in this outgoing message. > > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > > Version: 7.0.322 / Virus Database: 267.6.4 - Release Date: 6/6/2005 > > _______________________________________________ > > clug-talk mailing list > > [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > > **Please remove these lines when replying > > >
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
