Anyone Have Home Web Server Experience?

Are you suggesting that's what ET is run on?

That is actually a great idea (and not for nothin, something we do at our shop for clients). Four Mac Minis would get him 8-cores and 64gb RAM and a decent amount of storage - Hyper-V or VMware High Availability Cloud Infrastructure would be a help. Hyper-V is free, just sayin.

 

I'll try to address some of your points, but first thanks for all input.

The current sandbox was bought new in late 2010, it has been a great development tool and has been very helpful in allowing me to tweak for better performance on the sites. It was bought when I first started.

As to why I asked here, there use to be some very knowledgeable people here that were keeping up with the latest hardware developments. Perhaps someone knew when IBMs new 12 head chip was going to be out had tested it or something like that. Maybe that has changed since I was active.

Winston, I shared privately with you what our next projects are and as you know for many of the sites on the web, they can get adequate performance in a shared environment on as little as 1 gig storage, 10 gig monthly pipe, and 256Meg ram (not gig). And this is usually possible without their sites experiencing cpu throttling and such.

But the moment you increase the data crunch, and traffic they get into trouble. Their sites get sluggish, bounce rates increase, lost opportunities. Most people think a site has 10 seconds to grab and hold a visitor, but I have found that to be a high time.

Now factor in the use of traffic analysis software, such as that from analytics, and JS library retrievals that many sites and hosting companies use as well and you got a recipe for disaster.

A recent study showed that pauses and breaks in video distribution from Youtube is actually hurting them. Several companies in fact are stepping into their area, but focused on businesses and delivering video better. I've heard that AOL is looking into higher quality throughput.

I am not looking at what I can 'get by with' today, but what I'll need for tomorrow on these new projects. I'll use the server to test, and tweak as this would be about the min specs for a co-location server and i'll need comparable equipment. I don't want acceptable for data push, I want that higher quality so I can grab and hold the visitors attention.

As to using cloud computing, I will not use it. Someone here can most likely confirm what I have read that many EU states open suggest their citizens stay away from any company on that because of PRISM.

Baron, I honestly had not considered Mac equipment, but that is a possibility for the sandbox.

 

When you say quad-core (or you want 4 cores) is that minimum, would you take more? If you want something really cheap - go buy a Dell Precision 490 workstation. The RAM may be a little expensive... but they are less than $500 for a dual-xeon server-grade (silent) machine.

Buy a T5500 and I think you could run a single quad-core without hyperthreadding, DDR3 RAM (mobo has 6 DIMMS) and the ones I run have 6x 3.5" spinny HDDs and then 3-4 SSD's. I use sata power splitters, a full 8-port RAID card as well as a few SATA ports on the motherboard. It's a little tight and cramped but it works.

You could pick up a single-CPU Dell T5500 at the outlet with a warranty cheap.

 

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