[Gllug] Maybe this is a FAQ

[Steve Nelson]

On 4/16/06, Adrian McMenamin <adrian at mcmen.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> But:
>
> * who would you recommend for Linux (httpd) co-lo and what hardware
> would you recommend for a start up designing/hosting sites etc

For colo, Exonetric and Black Cat Networks have been recommended in
the past - I personally recommend Exonetric.

But to make any reasonable recommendations, we're going to need much
more information that "designing/hosting sites etc" - that doesn't
really tell us anything.  What sort of sites? Static content? Dynamic
content? Does this include mail solutions? Or just the web stuff? 
What sort of traffic volume?  What degree of availability is required?
 Are they multi-tiered architectures making calls to database servers,
perhaps with an abstracted application layer?  What sort of database
servers? Application Servers?  What are you going to do about
firewalls?  What about intrusion prevention/detection?  How will you
handle monitoring? What sort of backup infrastructure are you setting
up?  What sort of turnaround do you need on spares if, say, memory,
disk, or processor fails?  Are you going to implement load-balancing?
If so, how?  What are you going to do to ensure you have access to the
machine if, for example, sshd dies?

There are lots of approaches!  You could just get wadges of commodity
hardware and use virtual machines.  You could decide that you wanted
to run on cheap, reliable, old-fashioned unix machines, such as Sun
kit - eg a few netra t1s.  Considerations might include how much space
you want to take up, how much power it needs, how familiar you are
with the architecture.  You could look at making your own budget 1U
machines.  You could buy a job lot of old dl360s.  You could be
influenced by the good things that have been said about 64-bit amd
chips.  You could do anything at all.

I don't know what to say really - but let's take an example - I want
to run a couple of dozen websites, some are just static content, some
need a database layer, but nothing fancy.  Availability isn't that
much of an issue - if something breaks at 1am, it doesn't matter that
I can't get spares immediately and I have to drive to the datacenter
the following morning.

I'm not sure I can think of a reason to start up a business offering
this sort of service, but suppose I did, I am sure this could run on a
single machine of sensible spec.  I would personally go for older
generation known hardware - an older compaq or hp, or a dell machine. 
These are resilient, nicely designed, and run linux without effort. 
Until recently we had a company running a few pretty high volume sites
and a large MySQL database all on one DL380G1.  Check ebay - these are
dirt cheap.

I am curious to know what your unique selling point is - last time I
looked there wasn't a shortage of people offering web hosting
services.

S.
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