Moving on up! I think.

I own and operate a web-based business. I'm not a programmer or a particularly tech savvy individual so I have been using the services of a, well, I'm not sure what to call it --> I pay a guy to host my website on his server and he gives me an interface to make running changes to my site without having to know anything about HTML. It's been good to get me off the ground but now I'm finding it extremely limiting.

I will soon be bringing a partner in on the business who is a programmer but we need a little help on the hardware side of things. I have found a server co-location company in my town that will give me 5U for $250/month. As they have told me - "you have to know what to do with raw internet".

I think we do, but I need some recommendations on what kind of server, firewall, and switch we should go with. And/or if somebody can direct me to a resource for hardware related questions for newbies it would also be appreciated.

Thanks.

The kind of server all depends on the size of your website. You could probably buy a Dual Xeon machine for cheap nowadays which would run your website very well.

Since you have 5U of space, I would go for a desktop sized machine. You can probably find a good deal on eBay.

Greg

First of all, why are you considering a co-location?

You're co-location is going to charge you double what my local broadband ISP charges for a business account with a static IP and what some would call "unlimited" bandwidth.

You can buy whatever server you you want, house it at your own location and be charged probably half the price what you're looking at. My company's ISP charges us about $110 a month. We use a Dell Poweredge 2800 Server class machine running Windows 2003 server, IIS 6 and have a completely flash based website. The firewall is a Cisco Pix and the switches are either 3 Com or Dells.

To add to what your co-location said about needing to know what you're doing with raw intenet, you also need to know what you're doing with managing a web server. It's going to take more than a programmer. It's going to also take someone that knows how to fix your server when it's broke.

He has a good point. Unless your website is large scale, co-location might not be the right solution for you. It saves money when you run large machines and more than one of them.
Paying $250/month you could have a good sized managed dedicated server.

Thanks for the feedback guys - certainly has got the gears turning. I did some research with a couple of local ISPs. Looks like the best deal I can find is a dedicated co-axial line for $90 a month. This includes 5 static IPs, unlimited data transfer, download at 8 Mbps and upload at 1 Mbps.

My question is whether 1 Mbps upload is enough? How many concurrenct users will I have to have on my site before they will start to notice a lag. My website is very Web 1.0 - there's no flash, no interactive content. It's basically an online catalogue.

Also - any advice on hardware would be more than welcome. Looking for a good server based on a moderate budget. Thanks.

The prices are really very good.