Hardware Recommendations

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chasjs

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Nov 1, 2004
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What hardware would people recommend for hosting Directadmin in an enterprise environment? We use Dell PowerEdge servers for our Windows hosting. We set up a Linux Box about 2 years ago and have hosted a handful of site using directadmin. We would like to expand our directadmin hosting and want use reliable equipment.

Thanks for your help.
 
If you're happy with Dell servers and they work for you, by all means continue with them. Dell makes good servers.

But if you're looking for either more reliability or less cost, then give us more information. For example do you intend to overload the boxes? How many static vs dynamic domains? Heavy email? Heavy imap?

Even then it's hard to say, but we find we can run between 200-250 average (whatever that means) domains on a server with 3GB Intel P4 with ht, 1 Gig memory, 120 - 160 G dual drives running software RAID.

Or looking at it another way, you can probably handle 1.5 to 2 times the number of domains on Linux/DA as opposed to MS/IIS. Conservatively.

Caveat: Though we're a MS hosting partner we haven't actually done any Windows hosting since W2K.

Jeff
 
Jeff:

Thanks, you are right I should give more information.

I would expect to run between 100 to 150 domains on a box. Since direct admin combines the email and hosting on the same server, I would rather be conservative. Our experience is that email is usually the biggest load with our customer base. Although we are looking at a gateway server to do first level spam filtering to take some of the load off.


On a Windows server performing hosting only, we can get over 200 domains on a server easily.

What sort of software raid are you running?

Our typical server configuration would be dual pentium processors (3 MHZ) with 2 GB of Ram, 5- 36 GB SCSI HD in a RAID 5 Configuration. Fault tolerance is big for us.

I will admit my Linux knowledge is limited and I am not sure about compatibiity with raid hardware, etc.
 
Our typical server configuration would be dual pentium processors (3 MHZ) with 2 GB of Ram, 5- 36 GB SCSI HD in a RAID 5 Configuration. Fault tolerance is big for us.
Click to expand...

I hope you mean 3ghz not 3mhz lol
 
Well, if he were running at 3MHz that would explain why he'd worry :) .

Your spec'd server should work fine. Linux environments are a lot more frugal with resources, and generally a lot better at memory and other resource utilization, than are MSW environments.

We use Linux software RAID. I've gotten into lots of discussions as to why I think that's better (much better) than the cheap RAID cards most of us end up using. But the bottom line is that most cheap RAID cards are software RAID.

We use RAID 1.

The more drives you have the more chances at failure you have. RAID 1 is fully redundant.

We also use SATA becaue it's as fast in most webhosting environments as SCSI, at a better price point.

Jeff
 
Yes, I meant GHZ.

Jeff thanks for your comments.

Just, FYI, we have seen a lot of drive failures recently for SATA drives so we are a little gunshy of them at the moment. Dell recently recalled a bunch of 250GB SATAs made by Maxtor.

In your raid 1 configuration have you had any trouble doing a hot swap rebuild when using the software raid? I read somewhere the software version of Raid 1 had trouble with that.

We use Raid 1 in mail servers because of the high amount of read-write activity, Raid 5 for hosting, and Raid 10 for database.
 
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