i purchased a dedicated celeron server with 1GB RAM and Cpanel. As i am not experienced with dedicated servers, i have some basic questions... 1. How many sites i can host at maximum so that the server can tolerate? 2. If i am to host just 1 site, how much traffic it can tolerate (in terms of uniques) thanks for your help
That is an impossible question to answer in redgards to "how many sites" You could have one EXTREMELY popular site that bogs the system down or you can have a hundred smaller sites that do it depends on site popularity. Also it completely depends on the content of your site. If your site is just competely text based and no databases versus content rich. It would help to see an existing site first and gaguge it off the current server load + the loadtime of the page. If this is a dedicated box then you have a lot of flexibilty in regards to tweaking apache (or whatever webserver your running) to fit your exact needs and structure. IE: Remove Tomcat if it's not needed and reduce the overhead. Show me some examples or let me have a look at your system and I can give you a better idea.
No clear cut answer cause you did not provide enough info and even with complete info, a definative answer is still not possible. Generally. You can host a lot of static (html) sites. Database or script intensive the number goes down. The one gig is pretty good. The cpu and the size of the pipe is going to determine traffic. Number of DB connections and total count of mysql queries. Total uniques for one site would again depend on the type of site and what you are serving. Hopefully you will add a little more information and someone a tad sharper than me will provide a better response. Did you get a stated bandwidth or connection size?
A single site can crash a quad core xeon while 500 sites can run well on the same...it's totally relative.