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Buying/building web server need some advice
Posted by fenix793, 06-15-2008, 04:56 PM So I need to build or buy a server to run my site. The site will use a basic LAMP setup and we will also be allowing for file uploads and downloads. File sizes aren't expected to be too large, mostly word/PDF documents and maybe some Powerpoint presentations. At the moment we can only afford one box to run the whole site so we need to build something that can handle both file serving and basic site stuff. I'm wondering what kinds of hardware we would need to make this happen. If I were to setup a box with a quad core CPU, 4-8GB of RAM, and a few 15K RPM drives would that be able to handle file serving and PHP/mySQL? Would multiple processors be required? What about RAID? I guess the real question is what kind of hardware requirements are involved with setting up a file server. I'm guessing running PHP and mySQL is not really an issue but I don't want the site to slow down because of the file serving. I'm sure some of you have experience with this sort of thing so if anyone knows please let share your thoughts. Thanks!
Posted by Matt -Seeksadmin, 06-15-2008, 05:33 PM Hey, If this is going to be a file server, the specifications of the system don't need to be anywhere near as high as you have said, unless you want a lot of space in which you need to have a look at a good raid setup. However, if you are going to run a complex MySQL database and php frontend to this file server (possibly databasing all files etc) then you are going to have to get something a bit more powerful so that it doesn't choke. Again, if you want a pure file server i'd be more worried about your connection and bandwidth, when you have 5 users downloaded you don't want to lose connectivity to your server, so i'd also look at a throttle limit as well. Basically if you can tell me what sort of use your putting the PHP and MySQL to then i can start letting you know more specifically about hardware
Posted by fenix793, 06-15-2008, 06:16 PM Thank you for the quick reply! OK so the PHP/mysql is used on pretty much every page of the site. The site is meant to get the user involved. Users can leave comments, add/modify events on a calendar, and leave ratings/evaluations. So there is a good amount of database use going on. I'm not sure what that stresses on the server but I am guessing it's the hard drives? I'm really quite new to this so I'm unsure how stressful our site really is. Only thing I can say for sure is if you are using the site you will be reading and writing to the database and occasionally uploading/downloading small files. In the future we will definitely split up tasks and have a dedicated file server but funds only permit us to have one server at the moment. We will definitely be putting limits on the number and size of uploads and downloads. That said we don't want to cripple the experience either. The system that I described below should be within our budget. If any of the specs are overkill then we can cut back on that and spend more on something else.
Posted by The Universes, 06-15-2008, 06:24 PM Assuming you use lighttpd for flat file serving, you don't need a high power setup. A dual core might even be good enough if what your trying to accomplish is a rapidshare or megaupload type of site for documents. I would get a RAID setup since your hosting files and may need the higher read speeds, depending on concurrent users.
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