How much power do I need?

I'm looking into dedicated servers, and need some tips on what setup to get

[zomega42]

My site currently runs on a windows server, with about 100,000 page views per day. Most pages are PHP or Coldfusion, with a fair bit of database access.

I have always used shared hosting in the past, now I'm switching to dedicated and I'm going to finally make the switch to apache. The problem is I've never hosted on apache before and I've never had to choose hardware, so I have no idea what my site needs. In particular,

-Will it be ok with 1GB RAM, or do I need more?
-Are regular IDE drives ok?
-Single processor or dual? what speed?
-What are your setups? ie daily page views, processors, and RAM.

Incidentally the one server will be handling the mySQL database in addition to the HTTP.

Any guidance at all would be much appreciated, I don't have the slightest idea about this stuff. Surely there is some sort of guideline to translate page views --> required hardware?

[ogletree]

For what you are getting I would guess any new server you get will handle that. You need to have a pretty busy server to need anything bigger than the cheapest server you can buy. Most people will only answer it depends. I would be willing to bet you can get 5 times that traffic and still be ok with a low end server. Serving webpages takes very little server. It goes up when you start doing massive queries on the sql. Like if you have one page that does searches and calculations.

[zomega42]

Thanks ogletree, that's definitely what I wanted to hear. I do have a search page with some heavy SQL but it usually works quickly.

[freeflight2]

I would get 2 small p4 servers and have one as SQL and the other as webhost exclusively - that way you can monitor how both DB / your application use memory and disk IO and go from there... I swapped servers 3 times in the first couple months after first benchmarking my sites - now I have servers with the exact same specs I need.
Also for php I use MMCache (php precompiler) and for mysql I optimized a bunch of settings in particular key_buffer and table_cache

[Visit Thailand]

I always find these are difficult questions to answer and find answers to.

One bit of advice I will give is shop around and don't be put off by special deals.

I made a mistake where I bought a dedicated costing tens of thousands of dollars a year because I did not trust the rather similar special deal the host was offering that only cost thousands per year.

It was a bit like thinkig can the LV bag be real if it only costs X, when they are offering similar for triple/quadruple that.

Well after one year I switched from the expensive one to a special deal and have seen absolutely no difference even under the heaviest of traffic the sites on it have ever seen (very big and long lasting spike numbers).

If you are moving within the same host ask how they move. On our first such move there was a mess with some non crucial yet useful files but now many hosts use Ghost or similar.

Ask as well what happens if you are not happy with the new server and want to upgrade instantly, how long will it take etc.

[freeflight2]

an other thing to consider: don't go with old, outdated servers which might be running for a couple of years already... best is to look for new offers with brand new servers, preferably SCSI - usually disks crash after 2-3 years with IDE twice to 3 times as likely than SCSI (best is RAID of course)

[ogletree]

My advice was for what you have now. If thing reall take off you may need to upgrade. freefight is right don't get used stuff. We have a server at level 3. You can get a dell blade real cheap these days. I think we pay like $100 a month for 1 U of space plus the server that was about $1000. It is cheaper to just pay a colo place $100 a month for one of their servers. You can pay even more than that if you want a bigger server.