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Post by ttsanoski on Apr 21, 2009 3:44:25 GMT -5
Greetings everyone. I am curious about the traffic pressure on personally hosted apps and websites at home. I am about to get my student loans, and I'll have a little extra money. So I was thinking of buying a cheap computer, running Linux, to act as a web server. Generally speaking, what are my limitations? How many users can it serve at once, etc? What kind of processing power should I go for? Etc, etc -- what are your recommendations, and what variables should I consider?
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Post by StefanPendl on Apr 21, 2009 5:21:28 GMT -5
Most important is memory, the more the better (8GB, 16GB, 64GB, etc.) The fastest processor is not always the best, the connection to the other components is important, FSB speed for instance. If you are able to get a machine specially build to act as a server, you will be happy. You may consider a personal server service too, but best would be to use Run BASIC net, which is targeting hosting RB apps.
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Post by ttsanoski on Apr 21, 2009 5:56:27 GMT -5
You may consider a personal server service too, but best would be to use Run BASIC net, which is targeting hosting RB apps. Yes, that is an option for many people. But I'm studying computer science, so I am not merely interested in hosting. Simplicity is a virtue, but the point of my experiment is to see how things work. This is my first year of college. I have to go through a bunch of boring core classes. I probably won't even get into my major classes for a few years. But just because I don't have any cs courses yet doesn't mean I cannot teach myself as much as possible on my free time. That is the purpose behind running my own server. It is strictly an educational experiment.
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Post by ttsanoski on Apr 21, 2009 6:07:26 GMT -5
...If you are able to get a machine specially build to act as a server, you will be happy. How do server machines differ from ordinary computers? I suppose it's mainly various packages and libraries, hardware and configurations, but aren't server machines expensive? I really don't want to spend more than 500$.
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Post by kokenge on Apr 21, 2009 7:31:46 GMT -5
I've installed hundreds of on-line systems. And, like always, it depends on what you want to do.
For what I do, I've always found bandwidth to be more important than computer power.
If you are writing applications like manufacturing systems, or HR you normally find that they don't do much and don't require a lot of power. And again it depends on how large your user base is. I've installed systems with a low user base and large hits, and large user base with low hits. You have to plan for the peak usage, meaning that most of the time the system is fairly idle until the big crunch. For example I installed some of the largest cities HR systems averaging about 50,000 people each. For the most part people work to keep the data updated, and anyone can sign in and look up their information. So you only get a few thousand hits a day, and not much going on at night. But then comes the payroll, and the hardware is now processing huge amounts of data. So if you want to get the payroll out in say 6 hours of crunching, you need some power.
Currently I have a small web ERP system running several businesses on a PC at home with ON-IP. It only has about a thousand users with low hits. I only get maybe 10 hits a minute. Almost noise to the computer. I'm running on a $200 computer with 2 gig. I do replication to another $200 computer so everything is always up to date and I never have to do backup.. Basically unless you have a application that requires a lot of hits you can live with a cheap computer. All depends on what you want to do..
I've found you can do more to cut your hardware needs by finding the hot spots and modifying your software than buying hardware. It's cheaper and easier than upgrading hardware. I've had SQL lookups that take minutes, and modified the DB and/or software to make it look like noise. Even batch processing. I've seen some SQL's run for hours, and by changing the software/database, drop it to a few minutes.
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Post by mackrackit on Apr 21, 2009 9:37:15 GMT -5
The hardware in a server is more like a truck and a personal computer is like a small car. Sort of...
You may find "hot swappable" hard drives, better/bigger power supplies, lots of redundancy built in. If you are not setting something up for a large company go with the $500.00 or less machine.
Another thing to consider is a Linux box, now that Carl has a headless option. It take a whole lot less power/resources if you do not have to run a GUI.
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Post by votan on Apr 21, 2009 16:25:47 GMT -5
Somehow we are missing the point here..... you said you want to run a server at home.. so you definately do not need a server with hotplugable 15K drives, 128 gigs of ram, multicore xeon processors etc etc.... or like kokenge already said... a $200 system is more than enough... depending on what you need. Even if you are connected to a fast cable connection, your upload speed will most probably not exceed the 1 mbit.... This is not suitable for real webapperances with many simultanous users, but is still ok for some tiny webprojects or for testing. So any not ultra outdated machine will be enough to serve... especially when using linux. So anything starting with a 2,8 GHz P4 and 512 mb ram will work.... more is always better.... but the slow homeconnection will be the bottleneck anyway. For homeuse, just get an older computer that you still might have left somewhere.... install linux, RB and simply check if it fits your need. To see real world connection-speed, use any of the online anonymous browsers, as they connect to your server from some far place and not internally through your lan. This will give you a feeling of what the speed will be for people connecting from the outer world. And "traffic pressure" depends on how many users browse your sites and what you are going to serve.... normal html pages with text = low bandwidth... pages with lots of images, flash animations etc = high bandwidth
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Post by Carl Gundel - admin on Apr 21, 2009 16:46:06 GMT -5
I agree with this assessment. If you are putting up an experimental site that will only have a few simultaneous users you can probably get away with an old Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM. Your application may require more power but I can't speak to that without more information. Of course for $300 you can buy a new computer that will blow that old PC out of the water. As for bandwidth, a DSL connection will probably be fine for most web sites. The Run BASIC site itself ran on DSL for more than a year and there was no performance problem with hundreds of daily visitors. -Carl Somehow we are missing the point here..... you said you want to run a server at home.. so you definately do not need a server with hotplugable 15K drives, 128 gigs of ram, multicore xeon processors etc etc.... or like kokenge already said... a $200 system is more than enough... depending on what you need. Even if you are connected to a fast cable connection, your upload speed will most probably not exceed the 1 mbit.... This is not suitable for real webapperances with many simultanous users, but is still ok for some tiny webprojects or for testing. So any not ultra outdated machine will be enough to serve... especially when using linux. So anything starting with a 2,8 GHz P4 and 512 mb ram will work.... more is always better.... but the slow homeconnection will be the bottleneck anyway. For homeuse, just get an older computer that you still might have left somewhere.... install linux, RB and simply check if it fits your need. To see real world connection-speed, use any of the online anonymous browsers, as they connect to your server from some far place and not internally through your lan. This will give you a feeling of what the speed will be for people connecting from the outer world. And "traffic pressure" depends on how many users browse your sites and what you are going to serve.... normal html pages with text = low bandwidth... pages with lots of images, flash animations etc = high bandwidth
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Post by JackWebb on Apr 22, 2009 4:12:18 GMT -5
As was already stated above, your biggest bottleneck is going to be in your upload speed. Check this out speedtest.netDesign your server and your website based upon what you can actually serve. There are some very clever people out there serving up some good content and even making money at it. Look at this.. dslwebserver.comThis guy did a whole website on the subject of setting up a home web server, then monetized the site with a google adsense campaign. Pretty neat, and it's just old school hand coded HTML for the most part. Lots of good info on there. Like Kokenge said 200 bux for your server is a good place to start. I found a used laptop with 512M of ram on craigslist for 150 bux. it's about a year or two old. By the way, a laptop is in my opinion the best way to go for a home web server. It's small and can fit practically anywhere. You don't have to worry about mixing and matching hardware and it has a built in battery backup. I purchased a 2 gig usb stick for 10 bux at big lots. This is my "backup drive". The whole thing sits on top of my clothes dryer in the garage.. I almost never touch it because I don't have to. RunBasic makes it easy to update the site from my kitchen table laptop or any computer in the world for that matter. My total investment was 150 for the "server" 10 bux for a "backup drive" and 60 bux for RunBasic. 220 total cost. And for that price you could build any website you can imagine! Have fun and good luck! Come back to RunBasic. As you can see there are lots of intelligent good people here who are willing to share knowledge.
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