Any recommendations on Server Specs

[DBurrows]

Actinic has been a great sucsess for my business in the short time we have been using it, using google adwords we are now getting between 10,000 and 15,000 hits per day and as a result we are now wanting to get our own dedicated server.

What sort of spec machine do you think i should go for, 1, or 2 cpus etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreiated as this area is very new to me!

[Mike Hughes]

A couple of questions

1. When you say 'hits' do you mean page views?
2. What sort of growth do you want your server to be able to handle? they often come with 1 or 3 year minimum periods.

Mike

[DBurrows]

Sorry the views are between 2 and 3 thousand a day at the moment, the server company i will be going with have no set contract, its on a month by month basis.

As far as growth goes I would realistically need the server to be able to cope with 3 x that amount over the next 12 months with very little noticable effect on the end users browsing speed. (if possible).

Thanks in advance

[Mike Hughes]

OK, so 3 x 3,000 page views per day is close enough to 10,000 page views per day or about one every 8 seconds.

As actinic pages are mostly static (unless all your visitors are logged on registered customers) then serving this kind of load (or even 2-3 times as much to allow for peak usage) isn't going to be a problem for just about any dedicated server.

I'd suggest you just make sure that whatever you get has a newish spec celeron and 1G memory and you should be fine. You could probably get away with less but you wouldn't really save much and you might as well get something halfway decent.

There are a few hosting guys around here and they should be able to confirm (or correct) what I'm saying.

Mike

[DBurrows]

The server system i am considering is a Intel Pentium 4 3.06Ghz, with 1GB DDR Ram, 2 x 120Gb 7200rpm HDDs and 15,000Gb of Bandwidth a month.

Looks like this should be fine then, just wanted to be sure we dont need more!

[Mike Hughes]

That system will hum along very nicely.

Two things to make sure of if you're going for that spec of system.

1. That it's a Hyper Threading (HT) P4.
2. That it's connected at 100Mbps.

Both are probably already included. It's worth checking though.

Mike

[pinbrook]

you may want to consider your backup options too.

[Jim Riley]

Re: Any recommendations on Server Specs

Any decent shared hosting arrangement will EASILY be able to handle that kind of traffic - and more. I'd be very wary of going to the expense and hassle of running your own server. To give an example, our traffic has grown strongly each year since we launched in 2000 and we've simply upgraded the shared server arrangement with our hosts when necessary. We're serving around 300,000 pages a day currently on a shared server with no noticeable slowness.

Jim

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www.tutor2u.net

Originally posted by DBurrows
Actinic has been a great sucsess for my business in the short time we have been using it, using google adwords we are now getting between 10,000 and 15,000 hits per day and as a result we are now wanting to get our own dedicated server.

What sort of spec machine do you think i should go for, 1, or 2 cpus etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreiated as this area is very new to me!