[thelist] Re: Need some tips on setting up a dotcom [hardware related]

[Kevin Martin]

Quoth Michael Galvin <mpgalvin at eircom.net>:
> What I basically need to come up with is a shopping list of hardware and
> software required to start a dotcom.

Disclaimer:  Providing that shopping list is what I do at my day job.

You've heard from the nice people recommending some good shared hosting 
solutions; let's go a little toward the higher end.  For the price that
a fractional T1 would cost to get traffic into your office, you could
lease a couple of servers at a hosting provider that would put them 
directly on the backbone and have them monitored 24/7.

Why lease?  Simply put, the ala-carte pricing for colocation ("power, 
pipe, and ping" as separate line items) adds up quickly.  A bundled 
solution can be quite reasonable.  My little corner of the Internet is 
setting me back only $99/month; I've got 50GB/month of transfer (of which 
I'm using about one percent :-)) and I've got administrative access to
do anything within reason.  I got real tired of watching my dialup ISP
drop my mail on the floor, so having that box on the backbone with a 
static IP was worth a good bit more to me than $19.99.

I'd have to ask you a few more questions to size a solution, frankly,
but there's a lot of versatility in an Open Source platform.  One box can 
do quite a bit when it's not asked to provide a GUI; I'm serving a dozen 
sites and two separate mailservers, and my machine isn't even breathing 
hard.  I've avoided apps that require databases, though.

If you're going to be cranking a database, I'd get two small boxes rather 
than one big one.  You can sneak by without a firewall if you stay away 
from Redmondware (more accurately, the box can be its own firewall).  As
a matter of fact, I put together two solutions like that today.  With a 
firewall and Microsoft platforms, it would have been around $2,000/month.  
Using Linux instead, it was $600/month for a pair of machines.  That 
includes ColdFusion for Linux, 100GB/month of total transfers (50GB per 
box), tape backup of 10GB per month, a 100MB handoff to the backbone, 5 
usable static IP addresses, and 24x7 monitoring with five hours of 
sysadmin time per month.
-- 
Kevin Martin <evolt at brasscannon.net>