Significant Server?

[Tr1cky]

I'm taking over a website a friend has been running. He was renting a shared hosting and was having a lot of problems as far as to much traffic and the servers crashing. The website gets 6,000 unique visits a day, in order to fix this I am going to purchase a server and get colocation. Is this server going to be good enough if the website gets up to 15k a day?

Heres the specs (I actually haven't decided which server I was going to get, either one of these two. Any input would be appreciated.)

Dual 3.6GHz/1M XEON CPUs w/ HT & EM64T
8GB ECC DDR2 RAM PC2-3200
2 x 300GB 10K U320 Hot Swap Hard Drives
Dual Embedded Gigabit NICs
RDNT Power Supplies

OR

Dual AMD Opteron 280 Dual-Core 2.4GHz
8GB PC-3200 DDR Memory
3x 73GB Ultra320 15K Hot Swap SCSI Hard Drives
Integrated Dual 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters
Single hot swap Power Supply

The network shouldn't be a problem since I'm getting it put into a datacenter. Not sure what the specs will be yet, want to pay like $150/month for a 1u spot. Whatever that'll get me.

[LifeinAsia]

Either server is way overkill, unless you've got some other major applications (database, mail server, etc.) running and heavy duty processing going on. Are these static pages or ASP/PHP/other dynamic pages?

Unless you've got some huge dtabases or huge video files to stream, I'd say the RAM is 2-4 times what you'd need. What OS are you planning to run?

[Tr1cky]

The website is mainly php. It uses LOTS of bandwidth a month since it plays videos, music, etc. The servers might be a little overkill but I want to be able to put all my other websites on it since 1. I hate shared hosting. 2. Don't like renting dedicated servers. 3. Rack space is expensive. Until my other websites start generating enough traffic where they can afford to pay (+some) for themselves I will keep them on that server. I also don't want to have to buy another server for a loooonnnngggg time (5+years) and then get another few years of [low] use out of it after that. But with a setup like this and (Haven't really looked into exact numbers with colocation besides base prices) $150 or so a month on the network/rack space/colocation whatever you want to call it fees I should be alright.

[edited by: Tr1cky at 7:31 pm (utc) on Dec. 26, 2007]

[lammert]

My eye fell on this one:

1u spot

Two high speed processors, and 3 15k disks combined with redundant power supplies generate a lot of heat. I am not sure if you will be able to fit that in a 1U housing without cooking some of the components relatively fast. If you build your own server with these specs, go for a 2U housing and install plenty of cooling. If you buy an off the shelf server in 1U format, look carefully at the specs what the maximum combined power consumption is for that box.

And don't forget to ask your colocation facility how much power they will deliver to you, as this is often limited to about 100 Watt per server. I estimate your configuration to consume around 200 Watt which calculates to 8.4 kWatt per rack with 42 of these 1U servers. There are not many colocation facilities that can cool 8.4 kWatt per rack location and therefore most have limitations on the amount of heat generated per rack.

[LifeinAsia]

If you're going to put other sites on it as well, then it might not be so overkill (I was just going by the initial specs you listed).

Our config is somewhat like your first- 1 dual-core 3.2 CPU, only 2G RAM, 2 mirrored 73G drives; running Cold Fusion, SQL Server, and a mail server. We get about 30K uniques/day for all the sites, using about 200G/month of bandwidth. it's definitely been sufficient for us for the last 2 1/2 years- rarely even come close to RAM limits.

We're going to be greatly expanding the DB side of things next quarter, so we'll be getting a second box and moving the DB stuff there, but the existing server should be more than adequate for the web/mail side for several years. <*knock on virtual wood*>

[Tr1cky]

I wasn't going to build it myself. Also I contacted a datacenter that I will be doing business with and they said each server will get 250 watts of power. I never really thought about overheating with a 1u server. Good point, and thanks. When I had contacted them they said that my server could either be 1u or 2u for the same price. Hosting will be $150/month with 100mbps burstable speed.

[lammert]

250 Watt per server should be fine.

If you buy a brand server (Dell, HP, others) overheating won't be a problem. They have designed their system in such a way that there is proper airflow over all the heat disipating components.

But not long ago I had problems with a serie servers where the processor in some of the servers became very hot. One processor even died because of lack of cooling. The problem appeared to be caused by two different brands of processor cooling blocks. Both brands were rated for the same processor model and speed, but the cooling ribs on one model were 90 degrees rotated compared to the other model. Therefore one of the cooling block models blocked the internal airflow in the case almost completely, where the ribs of the other were right in the direction of the internal airflow, causing a perfect cooling of the CPU.

When you assemble a server from separate components yourself, or let the server build by non-cooling-savvy computer technicians, you might run in this type of problems.

[Tr1cky]

Thanks for the input. :D