I am planning to change from shared hosting to dedicated server soon, but I had no idea which hardware would be required to be running my site smoothly without paying too much for some specs that is too high for the needs. Site: http://www.nattawat.org My site is a phpBB2 forums (no index page, forum-only). Currently there are about less than 100 users online at the same time, but in the future I'd expect it to be more than this. Not only the MySQL and php files that are being loaded from the server, I also had about 8000 images hosted on my server that are being hot-linked constantly (average 30KB per image). I'm not sure about bandwidth usage, it could be around 5GB b/w per day, but let's just say 10GB+ per day to be safe. I had used VPS service from Shinjiru before (30% of 1.86Ghz x2) and my site always exceeded the CPU limit. I wanted to change to dedicated but I'm still unsure of which hardware should be used. I have no budget in mind yet, because what I'm asking here is: which dedicated server specification would I need, and what is the price I should expect? I am assuming that high CPU power would be the number one priority of this server. Please keep in mind that I am not going to buy a dedicated server right away, I'm just taking information all I can get before deciding to get one. Thank you for all your help, Nattawat
Hello, 30% of 2 x 1.86 Ghz is far less than what it sounds like (due to overheads and some hosts overselling), so it may be viable for you to simply move to a more powerful VPS. On the other hand, if you want to go dedicated, I'd recommend something no more than a dual core, and single core may still provide you with what you need. I suggest you get a small single core server initially, and see how your site copes. It shouldn't have any major bottlenecks, as (for example) 100% of 2 Ghz is better than 30% of 7.44 Ghz (you have to account for delayed I/O writes, RAM and swap usage and other factors when comparing VPSes to Dedicated machines). Jay
I believed that CPU usage is a big problem for me, so if I'm going for a dedicated, I should probably be aiming for 2 cores. Could anyone approximate the price per month I should be expecting?
That depends on entirely on who you go with. SoftLayer & Layered Technologies have some nice deals going on (we have our servers with both of them). You should look at their prices for a ballpark figure, note that SoftLayer is a top quality host, and we are migrating all our servers to them. Layered Technologies has a good network, but seems to raise prices too often. Jay
I'm not sure if you're looking for offers or not, so if this is outta line .. please ignore and accept my apologies. This setup I have lying around will work for your forum quite nicely I believe. Dual Opteron 240 ( 2 physical CPU's ) 1Gb RAM 2x120gb Hdd 2000gb traffic a month 3 IP's All that for only $99 a month. Please do let me know. Regards, ashagg