Help Me build a SERVER. I have a Few Questions.

[Purvin]

I am getting 3mbit dsl soon (Static IP). I want to make some money from it. What do you recommend? I need help with building a server and what i should do like setup web server or what?

I have linux / windows 2000 server bought and also have old copies of NT4 Server too. What do you recommend?

I have 300gb of storage now ready to go.

I need help in choosing
MOTHERBOARD
PROCESSOR (AMD, XEON, P3, P2 Etc.)
MEMORY TYPE (DDR, SDRAM, RAMBUS etc.)
Software etc. Please help if you can.
Case & Power Supply (300watt, 400 or 530watt).

Email Me please. [email]purvinv@hotmail.com[/email]

I want somethign that don't takeup too much time to maintain because i am still in college. I have right now a P2-400 256 MB Ram 300gb hd. But now i want to start hosting pages or something and i guess i need a BETTER & FASTER SERVER for that stuff. Want to Start a small web hosting thing and charge people some $$$ to host pages and hopefully this will help pay for college & dsl.

MY BUDGET IS MAX OF $1400. I already have the Hard Drive.

THANKS
PURVIN VAKHARWALA
Email Me please. [email]purvinv@hotmail.com[/email]

 

[fergiboy]

You will save money if you colocate your server wich means you house your server with a company that provides you with the bandwidth. This way you don't have to have a dsl connection. Check out Millenium Systems
If you don't know anything about web hosting go with win2k server. With win2k server you don't even need a video card or monitor for your server, terminal services. Of course that goes for linus too. It may be a lil slow but the user interface makes up for it.

 

[rootaxs]

The type of server you need will depend on how many sites you plan to host on it. The types of services you'll run on it and what features will each site use will also depend on it.

If you plan on letting this server do WWW/Mail/FTP/DNS then you should be set as it is. I would suggest at least a RAID config for your harddrive though. And a back-up as well. 300gb is a lot of data should you uneventfully lose it.

If you also plan on offering your clients the ability to use ASP/PHP/CGI + DB then more memory and a faster CPU will be needed than what you have right now.

Also, just a note/advice. Check with your DSL provider that they're OK with you hosting sites. Most ISP's i know of won't. Some will but only for personal pages while a small percentage will ask you to move over to their highest costing plan.

There's no real formula for this. You may end up hosting 1,000 sites that hardly use up resources and your server will be fine or you may have one site hogging up all the resources. It just depends.

If it will be a headless server as fergiboy pointed out then you won't need a big P.S., a fancy Video card or even a sound card.

Go for the AMI K7t Pro2 mobo if you can, this is one of the most stable of them all. Partner it up with either a high-end Duron or an Athlon. 256m of SDRAM is fine for this purpose. Go for more if after the first hundred sites you see more demand for it (check out ur performance frequently)

As for your issue on "That don't take up too much time to maintain". Sorry to tell you but serving sites is a full-time job. You always have to inspect the logs, monitor the activities, patch what needs patching and cleaning up your tempfiles/logs. A secure and good performing server is only as good as the one administering it.

Hope that helps

P.S. For your reference here's what i got. It's supporting a little over 60 domains right now

The primary *server* is a K63-450, 13gb drive, 128mb (now 320) RAM. It's doing WWW/Mail/FTP and DNS. It's also my workstation.

It's not that trafficked but it's handled approx. 415,000 hits in a quarter on the WWW service alone. Mail is doing around 150 messages/hour and the DNS is servicing around 3000 requests/day. This thing translates to approx. 2-5GB of bandwith per month (up, incoming traffic is a little bit lower, approx 2-4GB/mo). (I usually go beyond that, close to 10GB/mo coz i download a lot of stuff from the NG)

Take note that it's also my workstation so it's pretty tasked the way it is but it never seems to go beyond the 20% CPU utilization (unless of course i'm watching a DVD or doing some Photoshop work).

The secondary DNS is running on a Celery 500, 192meg ram, 15gb drive.

 

[cavingjan]

Couple extra things to add to rootas but we'll start with a question. Does your TOS allow you to run this type of server on their system. Companies have liked to distinguish between residential and business class service. (Its just a little reminder.)
If you are running web sites for friends and not charging, just about anything would work. If you are turning this into a business venture, data security and integrity are important and should be number one. So you need a good backup system and SCSI Raid running at least disk mirroring. Another key is a nice stable system. I would not bother with overclocking or tweaking to get the last bit of performance out of the system. You aren't gaming on it and you surely won't be rebooting either. Considering the hardware you already have, the bottleneck will still be the connection bandwidth. There are still servers out there running on PPros. Some more memory might be nice but I'd see how well the system you have performs first. Of course at the cost of memory now, getting even 512 or 1024 of memory won't set you back that much.
As for server OS, that is a personal choice. All three that you have listed will be fine. I personally use NT4SP6a but I did not get a copy of 2000 until recently and I do not have the working knowledge to efficiently run Linux. Not saying I can't but I'm not intimately familiar with it yet but getting there. Securing the site is a constant job. Its something you need to do all the time (patches, checking logs, etc.)
If you are just hosting for friends, maybe some of these items aren't as crucial as long as they know about them goign into any contract for hosting.

 

[rootaxs]

Good points cavin! I believe NT4SP6 is by far the best production level NOS you can get out of the Windows platform. I feel NT2k isn't mature enough for it... probably after it hits SP4 or 5 it'll be ready for this kind of environment.

 

[Purvin]

Cool Thanks anythign else you got. What kind of processor is good

XEON, P3 1ghz or AMD 1GHZ

 

[cavingjan]

Curious: what level of cost are you looking at for a webpage? What caliber are we looking at?
How better can I describe this? There are three things to worry about here:
Stable
Stable
and Stable

People are now paying you so there should be no interuptions of service.

Realize that this site is being run on a cluster of servers.

 

[rootaxs]

I'll go for the AMD. A Xeon won't benefit you much. A P3 will cost too much for your budget. Anandtech is run on AMD processors ;-)

 

[Viperoni]

Cluster 10 1gig Tbirds all with hedgehogs and 512mb+ ram.
Crunch Rc5 like there's no tommorrow
Lol
But it's true, ATech is run on Tbirds, or just the forums at least.

 

[kyoshozx]

Actually I believe the forums are running on dual xeon machines, and the rest of anandtech are on the 1 gig athlons.

 

[Purvin]

THANKS i will go with AMD now what is differnece between SLOT A AND SOCKET A which to get. I know more cache is good so what is good.

any DUAL AMD boards.

 

[kyoshozx]

Get socket A, because future chips will be socket A only. No Dual athlon MB yet, but probably coming out soon. You can get 2 machines and cluster them. Anandtech actually has a cluster of machines running there site.

One question is this residential or business dsl you're getting?

 

[Purvin]

Business DSL. But i am usign it at my HOME.

 

[Purvin]

Should i even bother with DUAL P3 then or just stick to AMD i want stable machine. IS AMD STABLE and if so what motherboard i want raid and redundand.

Can you explain what redudant is is that in motherboard or waht.. (i want to have a backup ps INCASE one goes bad.

THANKS

 

[kyoshozx]

Redundant power supply is when you have 2 powersupply so if one goes bad you'll still have another one powering your system. Then there is hot swappable powersupply in which you can remove and change one of them while you're system is still on. To support redundant ps, I think you'll need to get a motherboard that has 2 power connectors. The only ones i know of that has this feature are boards from tyan, but they do cost quite a bit.

Raid, well are you using ide or scsi hard drives? SCSI raid controllers are expensive, the cheapest ones i've seen are single channel raid and they still cost like 400 bucks. You should use raid 5 as that gives you the best performance and even if one harddrive fails your system will still function without a problem. Even with raid you should really get a tape drive for your server to do daily backups.

 

[rootaxs]

AMD *is* stable. Truth of the matter is, i remember at one time that AMD actually had the seal of approval from Microsoft Windows. Nowadays what makes the computer unstable is more of a software issue than a hardware one.

Anyway, to add to Kyoshozx. If you can't afford SCSI right now grab hold of the sIDE RAID/66 controller from Compgeeks.com. I got one recently for around $20 shipped. Supports RAID 0+1. Yes, you really should get a tape backup.

If you're doing a cluster however, one will always act as the backup to the other so in a way that's also redundancy.

Since you're really concerned about redundancy and stableness. Make sure you get a UPS, a back-up generator and a second/backup DSL/T1 line - *especially* the backup line.

Btw, what kind of DSL is this? SDSL? I doubt it since that goes only up to 1.5mbps two-way. Is you're 3mbit up and down? Sure hope so.. wouldn't make much sense if you're download speeds is a whopping 3mbit yet your upload is capped at 128k or so <g>

 

[Purvin]

hehe ok.

 

[cavingjan]

I would not waste my time on a server application on a IDE Raid array. You are trying to make the server run more stable, not have any issues, and make things easier for the server. IDE Raid in its current state, uses the processor for its calculations thus putting a load back onto the CPU instead of off loading it. A good SCSI Raid card has its own on board processor and doesn't bother the main CPU for such things.
rootax does bring up a good question. Do you have a symetric DSL line or asymetric? AKA was is your upload speed?

 

[Viperoni]

You coudl buy the Adaptec IDE Raid card...but that wouldn't be cost effective...
Best suggestion: SCSI raid

 

[rootaxs]

I hear the Adaptec IDE RAID card isn't faring so well with benchmarks. Too soon perhaps?

 

[Remedy]

Hey i have a few server questions too. I want to put up a server for occasaial gaming so and i have SDSL@256k business class, is that enough bandwidth for q3 and UT gaming, or should i ramp it up to 416k? Also the specs of the system is Dual p2 450 384mb memory, 10.2 quantum 7200 ide HD. But i can't decide on which OS to go with win2k or TurboLinux Server ed.

 

[rootaxs]

Would like to help you out there Remedy dude, but i'm no gamer (at least those games) so i can't say much about whether or not ur line and server is good enough.

But in all fairness, seems your server should b able to handle it. Not so sure about your line tho. A bigger pipe is always better. And oh! Make sure your latency is waaay low on your DSL line. Some ISP's don't care if you get 100ms or higher on a DSL line. If you can't get it below 50ms (i get 10ms on mine) then start complaining.

 

[Remedy]

i get 7ms on my line so now what?