Bought a new server...

Woops . I always get those ass backwards.

So do you think that purchasing your own leased line and machine will save you money in the long run?

What kind of leased line will you be purchasing?

if you are hoping to host your sites, with the amount of visitors you said you had been hitting, you might need a costly amount. Wouldn't a better dedicated host have been a better solution?

yes.

I would raid 10 it though. It is what I use for our sql/etc. Our webserver has less disk access problems, and more of a latency issue with open connections... that is IIS, my vm fedora box is faassst.

http://www.raidarray.com/04_01_10.html

IMO, the server itself you want reliability, ability to swap out drive without any downtime. Next you will want to use a SAN to store the data if it becomes larger than say 2TB (4 1TB drives will give you 2 TB in raid 10).

I purchased the machine, but will lease the line. At the moment, my machine is leased, and over the last 6 years have paid $9000 total for services. ($100-$150 a month for 70 months). So rather I will pay $75 a month and shell out more initially for the machine itself.

I will initially get a 100GB/month package and see how it goes from there.

I figure it will take 2 years to recover the cost of the machine considering the costs of leasing Dual Xeon Quad core machines...I'm getting a whopping machine at less cost when purchasing outright.

I hope you keep us updated with this like you usually do, John.

I've become a fan of leased vehicles VS bought vehicles because of the following two reasons, I'm curious whether vehicles VS servers will translate.

1) You don't have to worry about selling it when you want something new
2) Someone else takes care of maintenance

What happens to your 2 year figure if you have a harddrive failure in that time ?

Well the big bucks are in the CPU and motherboard. New HD's are cheap. 1 Terabyte for $150.

I will probably add a backup 1 TB within the 3 year bathtub curve just to make sure...

Speaking of backups, I'd recommend some sort of a backup routine like a tape drive and a bunch of tapes or an external hard drive or something. Me and grinch and ATNO and anybody else here who has ever done sysadmin type of work all know know about the "Oh shi....." moment when a server crashes and you loose everything and have to restore from backup.

Yeah, but how much does the data center charge you to do the installation of another drive on site ?
Surely you can't just leave a dead drive in the box and hope the backup holds out.
How long will you be down if you have to either pay what the data center wants to service your machine, or even worse you have to get it shipped back to you to do the repair yourself ?

Don't get me wrong, when you started this thread my first thought was that this is pretty cool. You know me though, I can't just let something stay cool, I have to poke at it and see what could go wrong.

Oh maybe I should have mentioned that - The datacenter, the gigantic San Diego tech center, is a stones throw across the canyon from my house. I could see it from my backyard if I knew which building to look at. They offer on-site visits during business hours so I can go there anytime if it screws up. Literally 12 minutes away from my house from the time I lock my front door, get in my car and arrive at their door.



No no, please keep it coming. Not knowing where the speed bumps are is worse than knowing how many speed bumps there are, just not knowing where.

How much would it cost you to get a commercial line run to your house ? It seems like you're close enough to the grid.

You could add another story to your house and rent it out to strippers who want to start working for themselves online.

Ahem, been there done that.

I call my spare bedroom, my $50,000 room. Since over the years, it has made about 50k.

Yeah but you have to take it to the next level, literally, with another floor of your house.

How about that commercial Internet line running to your house though ? Are you on the edge of the commercial grid or something ? I would think if I lived 12 minutes from the place my server was going to live, I might as well just get a line to my house.

I don't think I am near. I am across the canyon. I don't really want it in my house...

New server arrived today. I feel I am in no man's land at the moment. I haven't even plugged it in since I have so much to do this weekend but Sunday I may have time to start installing stuff.

I will probably start with CentOS rather than Ubuntu. Then LAMP, then xcache, and I will research a free control panel, mail, ftp. Oh boy...

Is there a package that does all the LAMP installation automatically? I know wampserver does something like it...but this is a pretty common install.