Hi Shawn; Your site rocks and I'm glad to see you have people interested in supporting it by donating. On my site the most I've ever had for donations was 80 USD over a four year period so clearly DP users value your services a lot more - and rightly so. Question though, because I've had to run on a really tight budget I've had to look into more cost effective ways of skinning the cat. For instance, for $19,900 USD you could get a Dell PowerEdge 1855 w/ TEN blades, 3.0GHz Processors and 20GB RAM. http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5876710098 It seems to me to be much more cost effective (you save about 75%) and you are already half-way there....
Agreed... you certainly can get a 10 blade setup for less than $100k... The expensive part isn't really the blade itself... the expensive part are the CPUs and memory. Single core Xeon processors with 2GB of RAM each is okay, but for the stuff I'm doing (tons of database stuff) you need as much memory as you can get (12GB per blade is the maximum). The other stuff I'm doing is very CPU intensive (thousands of dynamic http requests per second), so dual core CPUs is really the only way to go (I would prefer AMD Opteron, but Dell doesn't offer them unfortunately). Even with single core stuff, you really would need at LEAST 8GB per blade to do it "right". And density is a big issue (there is a monthly cost per rack unit), so being able to squeeze 40 Xeon cores and 120GB of RAM into a 7U area is key.
Hi Shawn; I was just thinking that you could skip the enormous premium a person pays for buying new from Dell when a lot of times the same (or close to it) can be bought from e-bay and then tailored. I bought a Dell PowerEdge 2650 (not in the same class!) from ebay for less then half the cost of a new one and on top of that it came with a transferrable 4 hour warranty. This was my first Dell and to be honest, after dealing with them at the people level I would never buy another - but I still got an awesome deal.
Oh yeah... for certain. If I'm able to find a better deal, I'm certainly going to do that... I'm not STUPID. I'm going to go with whatever place will give me the best deal on (new) hardware... Dell, eBay, or whatever else...
It is kind of a pity that Dell doesn't support AMD processors — they are kind of pro-Intel. AMD processors are cheaper than their Intel counterparts, and they really prove their worth, like my new computer, which I got from Hp Compaq. I was really surprised that they do support a line of AMD based systems!
Success can really be expensive. Believe me that in the last years I thought of many viral ideas that could bring in lots of traffic (although it would be a bit more difficult to monetize than better niches), but I was a bit turned off just thinking of all problems of having such a specs hungry site. But no pain, no gain