how would you spend $1000 on a server?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 01:40:56PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> I have about $1000 budgeted for a box that will mostly host a bunch of
> probably-low traffic websites, based on wordpress or maybe sometimes drupal,
> and some mailing lists.  I'm just wondering what sort of features I should
> aim for in such a box, if I want the hardware to last a couple of years:  is
> onboard RAID important?  Is a Xeon processor a big plus, or DDR3 memory?
> Should I be building the box myself & handpicking the hard drives etc., or
> are there particular manufacturers/retail outlets I swhould just trust?

Well xeon only really adds multi socket support, so I doubt you need that.

Hardware raid is easier to manage when a disk fails, but software works
perfectly fine (and in fact often faster).  raid1 is often plenty too,
unless you need a lot of disk space.  raid1 on a pair of 1TB or 1.5TB
SATA drives is quite a lot of space after all.

As for building, I always do that myself for things in regular cases. For
rackmount it becomes much harder (and more expensive too.  I don't think
you are getting a rackmount server for $1000 at all).

DDR3 is more future proof, and will soon (if not already) be cheaper to
add more if than DDR2.  DDR ram already costs quite a bit more than DDR2
and DDR3 after all, and DDR2 is likely to cost more than DDR3 soon.

> if i can come in somewhat under $1000, that gives me a little extra money
> for a backup system and/or UPS, which I might or might not have to purchase
> out of this budget.

Well I am still trying to find a reasonably priced good UPS.  So far I
think about $300 is the lowest I have found, given it needs real sine
wave output when using a proper active PFC power supply.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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