[ubuntu-uk] What to buy as an Ubuntu web server?

[Alan Bell]

don't buy hardware, look at renting a virtual private server. You will 
get stacks more bandwidth than you could otherwise afford and you get 
full root access and the ability to do a hard reboot. The processor will 
be very fast but the memory will be a bit limited, perfectly fine for 
PHP apps, but a big tomcat J2EE thing might need a bit more than the 
basic minimum. As it is on shared hardware it is eco friendly from a 
power and size point of view. I have a couple of Bytemark virtual 
servers and I am pleased with them, they have stood up to a couple of 
slashdottings (although I did need to boost the ram the first time that 
happened.) The Amazon EC2 stuff is interesting to play with, you can 
even start on a local Eucalyptus VM and move that to EC2 later which is 
a very interesting concept.

Alan.


Chris Rowson wrote:
>
> On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 12:22 PM, doug livesey <biot023 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:biot023 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi -- I may be looking to buy a web server for a number of web
>     apps (RoR served with Passenger & Apache) quite soon.
>     Could anyone advise me on what hardware to be looking for?
>     I would want decent speed, so good processors & RAM, and I would
>     like, if possible, for it to be quite clever about power usage.
>     Also (& isn't this always the kicker?) I don't want to spend a
>     fortune.
>     I'll say a few hundred quids, tops, for now, but I don't want that
>     to limit people's suggestions too much.
>     & if people have good resources for new & not-so-new machines I
>     could buy, that play nicely with Ubuntu, that would be great, too.
>     Cheers,
>        Doug.
>
>
> Hi Doug,
>
> You could check out http://www.serversdirect.co.uk/
>
> HP Proliant ML*** stuff there seems pretty cheap and servers that I've 
> looked at come with 3 years on site warranty (ymmv).
>
> Just be aware that at that price, any servers advertised as RAID are 
> likely to be using rubbish Windows orientated driver assisted fakeRAID 
> so you'll just be better off setting them up on software RAID.
>
> Your selection of hardware will be influenced by how mission critical 
> your applications are of course.
>
> Hope that helps
>
> Chris
>