Minimums for a do it yourself server? - What all do i need?

I will make one suggestiong: DON'T! The very first thing I see that is wrong is the use of a 56k modem... That is no where near what you will need to handle visitors to your site... Your best bet would be to at a minimum purchase a server and have it co-located at any of the number of hosts that will do it... They can tell you what programs they know how to administrate and you would have to have some type of network card that will be much better for your visitors... That would be your best option but you should be willing to spend at least $5,000.

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Chad Simper
Dynamic Internet Solutions

Running my own server sounds like an interesting idea. What do you think are the minimum requierements for a server that will have about 5 domains, run some heavy cgis, and need about 50 gb of bandwith per month.

I am especially interested in knowing what kind of connection such a server will require.

I'm curious as to how much more server resources the CGI scripts require to be parsed (compared to HTML/text pages and a proper explanation as to why. I have a pretty good idea but wouldn't mind an expert explanation
JP

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The Webmaster Promotion and Resource Center.
http://www.what-next.com

Hehe, looks like this post is getting some interest, but seems like there's only a few folks with the skill and know how to answer the questions. Anti where are you, we need your knowledge?

Hi,

the hardware you need depends heavily on the load you expect.

With a 56k modem, a P133, 32MB-Ram and 200MB-HD (plus WebSpace) you can easily serve 5000 pages (~50KB) per day and still do mail and some (small) cgi's.

For the software i recommend debian/gnu-linux (http://www.debian.org/). Since it works right out of the box and is (by far) the securest linux-distribution.
All needed software (http:apache/roxen,ftp:proftp, mail:smail/exim+qpopper,news:cnews/inews,perl:perl,db:mysql,dns:bind) is included (or at least easy to obtain).

If you know linux you can setup such a system within a weekend without problems. (Our last one was build from scratch from Friday 12:00 til saturday 06:00 including buying parts.)

If you expect heavy-load you should use more than one system
and invest some more money in each.

But the 56k modem would'nt let much more through anyway.

Server colocation is the better option if you have (very) heavy load, but make sure you have access to your hardware at anytime !! (With a well configured system you'll never have to use this option, but sh.t happens.)

ciao
Anti
ps:
want more info ? just ask !

Neato!

Someone else that thinks it may be possible. I think I need to give folks an idea of the traffic I'm talking about, not much traffic really. Although I stated it would be for up to 5 domain names I don't expect to get more than 5,000 page request a day at about 50K (graphics and text) a piece. The thing is the cgi I'd require, around 15,000 request a day from my ad rotation scripts.

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Me again:

I'll ask my question this way. I'm looking at 5,000 page request a day pulling about 50k a piece and 15,000 cgi request from banner rotation scripts. So would a 56k modem, a P133+, and 32MB-Ram be able to handle this load?

Thanks in Advance!

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hi,

the cgi may result in problems.

if we assume that the 15,000 request are evenly spread over the whole day (which they won't be, do you have log's already ??) that makes 625 requests/hour, 10 per minute.
If your script is very optimized and you'll encounter no deadlocks that could work.

But I won't bet on it.

some things you should do (if you try it).

1. use a ide-raid. (not scsi. we just switched our db-server from scsi to ide as scsi slowed down the system by factor 2 to 3.)
2. use apache. apache is the better dynamic-server. roxen is better with static pages.
3. use a real db for your data. mySQL is good. textfile-db's will cause trouble under heavy load.
4. do some testing with your script. how many memory does it need ? how much IO ? how much cpu-time ?

just guessing I would say you could need a P233 (or higher) or even better K6. at least 64MB-Ram and a 4 disk-array (btw: RAID0 isn't RAID)

even better would be to set up 2 servers with (at least) round-robin for the requests. real load-balancing would be nice, but it'd be also overkill.

set the system up and produce load.
then we'll see which part is the bottleneck.

ciao
anti

Just a question, but would aDSL be an option instead of modem.

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Would it not be much easier, cheaper, and on the whole less bother to go with a normal webhost or get a cheap dedicated server? I think that home-based servers on modem connections are going to be *very* slow and you would obviously have a lot of problems along the way. I don't think you'd do yourself much favours in terms of the success of your site.

If you want your own server, why not look at a Cobalt RAQ? But with 5 domains it would be much cheaper to go with a normal host. Depending on what you want, don't be fooled into paying lots to CIHost or webhosting.com
- you are paying through the nose for their expensive marketing campaigns.

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True Hosting - $9.95/month

Well, all the systems suggested look good, but as everyone else says, the 56k modem's not a good idea. You pretty much have to have ISDN+ for any type of hosting. If you can find a cable modem provider that allows you to host a server, then you're set, and they aren't that much more expensive...

Good luck!

Hi,

I just stumbled into this article
http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.html and immediatly thought about this thread.

I think that supports our conclusion, the Server is _not_ the problem.

ciao
Anti
ps:
I hope the biker-forum.com incident is over ?!