I'm struggling with choosing a dedicated server.

There are a lot of options and it's difficult to make a decision as each company seems to offer different specs at different prices.

If you were going to get a server tomorrow, what would you buy ?

- which processor
- raid ?
- memory ?

How much would you expect to pay ?

Thanks

anyone ?

Hard to recommend anything not knowing your needs. I really like the PowerEdge series, the ones with the SCSI drives, hot swappable, using RAID1. Processor power, hard drives, and memory are more of a function of what you need versus what you want to pay.

I have a GoDaddy dedicated server (yeah, yeah I know). It's not that bad and the bandwidth is fantastic!!!! For less than $100 a month I have a dedicated 2ghz celeron with 512gb memory and 160 gigs of hard drive. It's a good start!

The godaddy service looks like a good deal.

• 1x120 GB disk drive • 500GB bandwidth • 1 GB RAM
• Celeron® 2.0GHz1 processor • Red Hat Fedora Core 4 OS
• Plesk 30-domain control panel
• FREE! SSL Certificate, a $19.99 value!
• FREE! $75 Google® AdWords® credit*

24 months, just $87.18/mo

I wouldn't bother with GoDaddy, I have heard some bad things about them but that is just me

Originally Posted by illusion

I wouldn't bother with GoDaddy, I have heard some bad things about them but that is just me

Is that bad support or bad performance ?

Bad support and uptime. Numerous users said that GoDaddy has pretty bad servers

GoDaddy shared hosting is terrible, I can tell you first hand but their dedicated may not be that bad. I personally use Server4Sale. I had a rocky start getting set up with them but ever since then they've been great.

They're a LayeredTech reseller, and you can get a box like the below for $110/mo with a control panel and a degree of management:

2.8ghz P4
80gig drive
2gb RAM
2000GB bandwidth

GoDaddy is good for domains only (and even that is up for questions). Stick with a real company for dedicated servers, such as SoftLayer.

I recommend LiquidWeb with fantastic phone and email support. They've answered my calls at 4 a.m. in less than a minute! Just the best with them.

Originally Posted by illusion

Bad support and uptime. Numerous users said that GoDaddy has pretty bad servers

It handled serving hundreds of thousands of images without a delay when I got hit with some crazy traffic.

It didn't flinch when I served 225,663 Pages (435,714 Hits) and over 3.5 gig in just one day for one site (I have about 15 sites) on an Windows/IIS machine.

I'm not sure if you be able to compare bandwidth to the rest of the net for less than $90 a month.

Theplanet has a value line called servermatrix - starts at $69 p/m.

After going thru many, many *sigh* hosts over the years, these have been the best servers so far. Good support, good prices and good uptime (my machines are at 346 and 260 days uptime).

As to what you need, my suggestion is to get enough to start and then ugrade - more of a pain, but why pay big money for a machine/bandwith unless you know you are going to use the capacity?

Starting off: 2.4ghz, 1 gig RAM (min), 80gig - should be able to get it for around $120 - add a second drive for backup if poss

my 2c

I also use theplanet, both the lower end server matrix and theplanet itself. Your needs really depend on your load, but like what clickbuild said, starting off small then working your way up is a better way of going about things, and most dedicated providers now have no contracts or setup fees.

Originally Posted by dogisland

If you were going to get a server tomorrow, what would you buy ?

- which processor
- raid ?
- memory ?

How much would you expect to pay ?

I will make the presumption that you are planning to deploy an Intel based system.

In such box the three most important parts, in my opinion are Cache (L2), Clock Speed (GHz or MHz), and Front Side Bus Speed (FSB).

The current maximums available on street are 4MB L2, 3.8GHz Clock Speed, and 1066MHz FSB. Unfortunatelly you cannot get all this in a single CPU.

The closest one is the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965. the specs are 2x2M L2, 3.73GHz Clock Speed, and 1066MHz FSB. It has hyper-threading, dual core, 64 architecture, and a few more fun things.

RAID - although as earlier mentioned RAID 1 (mirroring) is a good solutions, a RAID 10 (sometimes referred to as 1+0, 1&0), is definitely a better solution. The RAID 0 part provides striping, making disk access faster, (and further redundant). And mirroring (RAID 1) provides redundancy. Moving further up the "RAID chain", to something like RAID 1+0+5, provides striped parity, or even RAID 1+0+6 with dual parity provides better recovery, but speed suffers.

In case of memory - the more the better, EXCEPT you need to make sure the memory is as fast as possible the motherboard can handle. Slow RAM, no matter how much, just wastes CPU cycles.

One thing you did not mention is network connection, both network speed and network cards. Those are just as important as your box.

About $500 - $2,000 / month.

Good luck.

These are great answers, thanks. And, Libertate has given me a lot to which I hadn't though of.