Really good server hardware specs for peace of mind

[spaceman]

Hi All,

I've got two 'old' dedicated hosting servers in the USA, one running Redhat 7.3 (P4 2.4Ghz) and another Fedora 1 (P4 2.8Ghz). Both machines have 2 x 80Gb IDE hard drives, where the second drive is solely for cPanel backups.

I wish to migrate all sites from both servers and consolidate in a single more robust, more powerful server. Here are the specs I'm looking at:

Dual Xeon 3.2
2Gb RAM
2 x 250Gb SATA in RAID 1
1 x 250Gb SATA (for cPanel /backups)
RHE 4
cPanel (of course)

So the key change I'm going for is 3 HDs, with two of them in a RAID 1 config and the third for cPanel backups.

I'm not after special offers or deals from anyone. As a fellow cPanel user and (presumably) website hoster, my question is - what do you think of this hardware setup?


It's not every day you migrate lots of sites to a new server, and so I feel it's important to choose the initial/base hardware config wisely.

Is there any glaring opportunity I've missed here to get myself sorted out with a damn good server that's going to last me a few (couple of?) years?

[dalem]

that set up is fine
but I run 2x 250's raid 1 and back up the sites over vlan to a 2nd server (keep one local)
if that server crashes backups are all ready to go and accessable but you would need muti servers which you may not have

[spaceman]

Thanks for that feedback. I'm actually considering a remote backup solution outside of the data centre in addition to the RAID + 3rd drive 'total peace of mind' features :-)

[dalem]

you will notice quite the performace gain going from IDE to Sata's
I use nothing but raid aray's raid 1 & raid 10 have not had to reinstall a OS because of a hard drive failure in years its nice just popping in a new drive and build the new aray (at least your thinking ahead as those raid arays will do nothing for you if you blow a PS, motherboard, or have drive curruption)

[MMarko]

IMHO it is better to spread your sites over 3 different servers in 3 datacenters than having one server like this.

I think this would cost you around $350 - $400 / per month. For that price you can get 3 Pentium4 2.x with 1GB ram, and main 80gb disk plus 40gb for backup. And you'll have backup on 3 different places.

[jsnape]

It's not every day you migrate lots of sites to a new server

True... sometimes a week goes by... But, oddly, I agree with the othe poster, $800 or $8000 servers are suseptible to having problems, and if one crops up that's hard to pinpoint it would be better to have less people affected and easier to track it to one user. Four or five or six high process users, and a nagging sporadic load problem is a P I T A !

[spaceman]

IMHO it is better to spread your sites over 3 different servers in 3 datacenters than having one server like this.

Couldn't agree more! We already have two dedicated servers locally here in Australia, so we can shift resources/sites around exactly as you describe. We tend to keep the bulk of our hosting accounts in the US because bandwidth is stupidly expensive here relative to the US.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who's posting here. It's reassuring to know that I'm more or less on the right track. I've been doing this (hosting with cPanel) for nearly 6 years now, but it's good to have a reality check with my peers once in a while.