Guys, I need some help here. If you had, say, 6 grand to spend on a server, what kind of server would you buy with what features, how much memory, processor, # of drives, etc.

Thank you very much for the advice

6 grand is a lot of money for a server. With that kind of money you would probably get more power than you need. But.. depends on if you will use the server to host other sites or not.

6 grand would be really top end for sure. I just threw that out there. I have about 8 sites that I have, plus about 12 others for a total of around twenty.

I just want to make sure that the server is NEVER an issue for visitors.

A 2U dual Intel Xeon 2.4ghz with 4 gigs of RAM, a SCSI RAID card, 2 36 gig 320 SCSI drives, and a 120gb IDE drive to dump your backups and/or logs onto will cost about $4700. Add a few more drives to it if you need more space for your stuff and you'll have a machine you can run without worring about it.

If you go AMD you'll save even more (especially since they can't take 4 gigs of RAM) and of course of you go all IDE you'll save even more. Seriously though I'd avoid using the AMD MP and spend the money for Intel.

A quote from our server vendor "AMD servers account for 20% of our sales and 80% of our service and RMA costs." That's a pretty powerful quote in my mind.

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A quote from our server vendor "AMD servers account for 20% of our sales and 80% of our service and RMA costs." That's a pretty powerful quote in my mind.
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Ouch! Thanks for that insight Dave

Intel's ability to handle more ram is about the only thing that would lean me towards them. I'd prefer a 1U server though. I am hoping to sell of an acre of land next year to purchase my own server for colocation. I may hold out and see how AMD's Opteron processors are kicking.

As of the last batch of servers we bought the AMD chipset would only support 3.5 gigs. Past usage tells me that 3.0 gigs is the actual ceiling. Above that and the server takes forever to boot and doesn't recognize the memory.

Some of that 80% was us. When we ran into our rash of problems with servers a while back they were all AMD. Our Intels have never been a problem. Needless to say we no longer purchase AMD. Most of our OpenTopic servers all have much higher load averages then these web hosting servers yet have uptime measured well over a year.

We gave the AMD a try because they came well recommended but we found that stability and memory issues were too large a problem to work around.

What motherboards were being used? Tyans? I know they needed to reserve a block of memory for the PCI bus? I believe... I'm using a dual amd 1800 on an MSI board but only have 2 gigs of memory in use. I know I can use a full 4 gigs (well am told that) as there is none needed to be reserved.

Would you mind telling me the specs of the OpenTopic servers? I may very well just purchase a carbon copy

Yes, Tyans. I don't recall the version number off hand. I'd have to look it up after I get these two UBB releases out the door.

The OpenTopic servers with the over a year uptime are all....well, kinda out of date now. They're P3's All the new servers that we put into OpenTopic are as quoted above. All the servers that we've been adding into webhosting are also as above with more hard drives. We try to make all of our servers the same, the only differences being the number of drivers and amount of storage will change depending on the application (DB server, web server, servlet engine, etc.).

If you're in the market, Dave, give me a yell, I'll get you in touch with our distributor

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If you're in the market, Dave, give me a yell, I'll get you in touch with our distributor
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I'll definately get a hold of you when I'm ready. I've put off buying a new vehicle for the last year and a half so my wife won't put me in the dog house when I purchase a small metal box loaded with electronics and ship it off to destination unknown only to make monthly payments to boot... LoL

Maybe it is just me, but I would not buy a server. The hardware is still changing too quickly and I need bandwidth. The server is almost incidental compare to the cost of the "hose". Also, I really get tired of hauling truck loads of obsolete PCs to the dump.

For less than $200 month, I can get my own server with all the bandwidth I need. Each year, I review the server offerings and I can move to a better or cheaper box if I want. I guess it is similar to lease vs purchase in the car business.

I agree. With my current host.... yes I pay a monthly fee, but if something breaks, they replace the hardware in an hour. That's their problem.