Cheap yet reliable server for Small Ecommerce site?

[Ghamu]

Just wondering what you guys would recommend. I would prefer a pre-built one from Dell or some other name brand with a warrenty (its for a client). But I looked at Dell's site and almost laughed at the dinosaurs there are selling for top dollar. Any leads to where I should look? BTW, I will be running NT with .net framework, if it matters. I always thought the days of building your own computers to save $ were over with advant of Dell and Gateway killing each other. This e-commerce server is for a small business, but sometimes they advertise on The Home Shopping network, so it may spike ocassionally. I would rather not build it myself as this is for a client, but whatever is cheapest and still reliable.
Thanks for any help!

 

[yoda291]

hmm, normally, I'd say you could get away with dual workstations running hearbeat/mon software....but since you're running windows....

It is my experience that unless you have a way of providing some sort of fault tolerance(heartbeat,HA Linux, LVS,BSD Cluster,RANT), you will probably want to go with one of those "laughable" pre-builts from dell or gateway. This is not to say a commodity PC built from off the shelf parts wouldn't serve, it's more for that one or two percent more stability and fault tolerance and testing that goes into a server system as I've always lived by 5 words when it comes to setting up servers, downtime is not an option. Granted, it happens anyways, but you want to try and avoid it. I have always recommended netfinity servers myself as I have always had good experiences with them but they are costly. You could try tigerdirect for a server or get an array of redundant nt systems together, tho you won't have a whole lot of horsepower.

I would just keep in mind that it doesn't sound like you need a whole lot of horsepower for your needs. Don't go for the dual p3s with a gig of ram, because small ecommerce sites will probably not use it, even if they are spiking. a mid-high end single cpu p2 will probably serve your purpose easily given 256-512 MB of RAM. And these are conservative estimates...you could most likely get away with less. The general idea is to lower cost by saving on hardware as well as brand.

If you do end up building your own, I recommend an all intel system. Yes, it costs more, but a board from intel is generally more stable than a board from a 3rd party manufacturing for amd. Granted, this is a minor point as AT is hosted on AMD machines and is plenty stable, but it's just my observations. I'm sure someone will come up with AMD is plenty stable arguments and anti-intel arguments, so I ask you take this suggestion with my opinion in mind.

 

[watts3000]

I run a small companies web site here off of a dell poweredge 600sc you can get these servers with scsi drive or without also you can get raid configs on the box. I run win 2k server with iis but a lot of people do run apache. As a matter of fact those poweredge 600's were designed for running samll to meduium size compaies website or email. Aslo my advice would be to you since this is a production box order the system. You get a nice little warrenty dell has great support. If something happens they are knocking at your door in less than 24 hours. I have a friend of mine that ordered to 600sc's for the small firm he works for he has one for fault tolerence.




http://catalog.us.dell.com/CS1/cs1page2.aspx?cs=04&keycode=6W463&br=30&fm=13

 

[Agamar]

Just make sure you get a Raid of some sort...It has saved my butt many times when a drive happens to fail.

 

[Ghamu]

Is raid really neccessory for a relativly low traffic site? The cost adds around $400 to the price (again, nothing DIY, just prices from Dell's site) The price I'm looking at right now is $600 ($100 rebate) for 1 yr parts and onsite warrenty 1.8 ghz P4, 128 DDR ram (upgrade with crucial later), single IDE hard drive and standard NIC.

I could DIY a little and add on a IDE raid and an extra HD. Or should I just go with a single SCSI (10K) which only adds $100 to the price, SCSI drive are more reliable, dependable, right? Or is that just a myth?

Lastly can I get away with the standard NIC, or should I spring for the upgrades such as:
Intel Pro 100S NIC w/ or w/o IP SEC Encryption [add $59]
Broadcom Copper GBIT Card [add $99]
Intel Pro 1000XT Gigabit NIC-Copper [add $129]

Once again, cost is a major factor as he has already scoffed at a $1200 machine someone else already bid on, and really didn't want another server (he wanted to add the site onto his linux mail server, but that is no longer possible with the .net e-commerce site)

 

[gaidin123]

Just use the onboard NIC. If it fails that part is easily replaceable providing you have a spare PCI slot. For a lower traffic site IDE drives will be fine. I think if cost was a big issue I'd buy a cheapo IDE RAID card that can do mirroring (RAID 1) and buy a second IDE drive of > or = the capacity of the drive that comes with the server.

RAID or some kind of backup solution that will let you restore the server quickly is a must.

Gaidin

 

[watts3000]

I find it hard to work with very cheap people. But I would follow gaidin123 advice and just buy a add on raid contoller and hard drive. Although I still would buy the stuf from dell that way if it goes down you have the parts and a service guy to install them by the next day. That beats any rma time it will take if you need to send parts back.

 

[Ghamu]

Is the increased speed of the 10K SCSI drive worth it? Is hard drive speed not really a limiting factor (the IDE drive is 7.2k)? I will probably go with the cheapo raid card (any recommendations?). You guys have been very helpful. BTW, for security concerns, is Win 2k the only real option, or is Win XP pro safe enough to use? And will 384 megs of ram do the trick?

BTW, as far as working with cheap people, I don't mind as they've been nothing but patient with me, and I will be getting paid very well for the project. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and recognize that not everyone is willing to pay the premium for the highest grade hardware, its kinda like cars, some people appriciate quality, and some people just want something "good enough". To extend that analogy, its kinda up to me to recommend the 'Honda' and not the 'Huyndai', rather than push a Mercedes Benz down throat.

 

[alrox]

If said company can advertise on cable tv, they can probably afford to drop a dime on a nice dedicated server box, you'd have the companies tech caring for the hardware and the connection speed would probably be better than the colo you're going to host it at, to handle said traffic spikes.

 

[watts3000]

Yes win 2k server is the only option. Windows 2000 and xpro are workstation os's therefore limiting the number of simultaneous connection top 10. What is the site coded in and also what database platform is it connected to.

 

[Buddha Bart]

www.rackspace.com

These people keep entire spare servers ready. A psycho with an axe could split your server in half and you'd have less than 15 minutes of downtime. Plus at ~200 a month you could get about a year's service for the cost of building your own, year and a half for the cost off a dell/ibm/etc. If your biz is still around in a year, ods are you'll need a major upgrade anyway, so you were better off making the hardware/bandwith issues SEP for the year.

bart

 

[Buddha Bart]

the easiest way to sell someone on a more expensive server is to estimate the cost of downtime (and frankly it should be done on every server anyway).

If you build a custom machine, and a part fails, you will have to drive to the store to get the part (or god forbid mail order), driver to the server, replace the part, and reinstall/restore from backup. If you're lucky and its something like a NIC or a Hard drive, AND you have a very quick/easy restore procedure (from your nightly backups right?) you're looking at 3 - 4 hours. Thats not assuming its a weekend, and you cant get into the building. Or its at midnight and you have to wait till tommorow to buy the hard drive, etc etc.

Now if you had a RAID 1 setup, it would have been a "oh, i should get on that soon".

For about $2500 from dell you can get a server with redundant power supplies, redundant fans, redundant NICs and redundant hard drives (raid). Those the overwhelmingly most common things to fail. Meaning a whole lot can go wrong, and the server will never hiccup.

So you have to ask yourself is $2500 to dell worth it over $1000 custom (or $2600 for a year at rackspace which is still the smart choice)? You have to figure out the average number of sales per hour, the profit made off them, and therefore the average dollar/hour that this server+ecomm site are earning you. Then you factor in your risk. For instance at my job with about 25 IBM xSeries servers we've found that you can pretty much rely on about 1 part per machine per year going bad. So right there if you custom build you're looking at your 4 hours of downtime (minimum, i'd bet you hard money it'd be more like 8 - 12). So you gotta figure out if the money you'd make in 8-12 hours is less than the $1600 for the server. Keep in mind, downtime has more effects than just the lost sales. Other sites will delete their broken links to you, people will think the place is amateur, people who were half done or just plain frustrated will call and waste your time, etc.

bart

 

[mattbta]

I bought a PowerEdge 1400SC with two 36GB SCSI, PIII 1.13GHz, 128MB EC RAM for $450 after rebate. I'm going to add a raid card soon and already slapped 512MB crucial ECC in it. This thing hums! And this is all for HOME use. Can't wait to get the raid for redundancy. It's also DUAL proc capable with the purchase of another vrm and cpu.

I'd go dell. It's just SO easy and the prices are good. I even had my dad buy a desktop for the sheer convenience and support, when I could have built a similar machine for about the same.

 

[BentValve]

Originally posted by: mattbta
I bought a PowerEdge 1400SC with two 36GB SCSI, PIII 1.13GHz, 128MB EC RAM for $450 after rebate. I'm going to add a raid card soon and already slapped 512MB crucial ECC in it. This thing hums! And this is all for HOME use. Can't wait to get the raid for redundancy. It's also DUAL proc capable with the purchase of another vrm and cpu.

I'd go dell. It's just SO easy and the prices are good. I even had my dad buy a desktop for the sheer convenience and support, when I could have built a similar machine for about the same.

Why did you choose that server? The 600SC has DDR and is P4 capable...yours is regular SDRAM and PIII.

 

[Thor86]

Fault tolerance and reliability and uptime equates to anything but cheap. Good luck.