New year, new server
Over at The Planet, they had an offer that was just too good! A Dual Xeon 2.8, 2 GB memory, 2 x 80 GB drives and 2500 GB bandwidth for $177 a month!
Currently we’re paying $170 a month for a Pentium 2.4, 2 GB memory, 1 x 80 GB drive and 1500 GB bandwidth so for an extra $7 a month there is a more than doubling of processor capacity, doubling disk and nearly doubling bandwidth.
The only negative is that The Planet do not support Debian as a standard distribution, their options are CentOS and Red Hat neither of which I particularly like however this is a small price to pay.
For the future, I found out that a 100Mb unmetered pipe is $1650 although it is not available on the cheaper servers. This is a fraction over ServePath’s $1500 however it doesn’t have the one connection per customer limit — not that I will be needing more than one unmetered 100Mb connections for now!
Before the server goes live I am going to spend some time performance testing. It’s really good to have the opportunity to performance test on exactly the hardware that will be deployed.
The present server is easily doing 0.5 million page views a day in addition to email and serving all of the static assets (mainly photos) so I would like to get to at least 2 million page views a day on the new server.