Help with reasonable hardware requirements

[mvarre]

I am in the process of evaluating the possibility of purchasing Plesk to better manage my *nix hosting. I was wondering if anyone had any feedback on what would be reasonable hardware requirements. I have seen the minimum requirements on the site, however i'd like to get some feedback from other admins running it.

Right now we dont have a ton of stuff. 5 sites being hosted, mostly all running PHP with some MySQL connectivity, but not a ton. Just daily updates content and the sort. We also have about 50 domains we host email for. Probably about 500 email accounts in all.

Now i know this isnt a whole lot, however if i make the decision to do this i need to make sure the hardware i have running under plesk will allow for fairly decent growth over the next several years.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
mv

 

[hardweb]

This depends on the offers you get. A decent configuration today is a Pentium IV with over 3.00Ghz with 2Gb of RAM. The RAM is important because you need to make your server able to handle peaks. Such a config can easily server over 300 domains. It depends however what you have on these domains. If you have now only 5 domains, I don't think that it's necessary to invest in a higher end configuration.

 

[smerkel]

RAM and Disk I/O are typically the two bottlenecks. Our low-end configurations are P4, 80GB STA drives, and 1GB RAM - and they work well. Our higher end configurations are Dual Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 6 x 80GB SATA disks in RAID 5 array, which handle 400+ sites well. We do have some customers that have very intense database applications that we have had to move to SCSI storage subsystems because of the Disk I/O requirement.

One thing I would recommend is RAID on your disks. I'm lazy and hate rebuilding systems, and drives fail more then any other part (excluding fans).

Good luck,

Steve

 

[mvarre]

Im thinking a poweredge 2850 with 143GB 15Krpm scsi running in RAID5. Dual 3.6Ghz xeon 8MB cache starting out with 2GB ram.

I suspect this should be quite sufficient for up to at least 500 domains, all running php and very basic DB stuff.

 

[hardweb]

This is more than enough. The human factor is even more important in the server performance. Even a monster machine can run poorly without the proper administration.

 

[mvarre]

I couldnt agree more, and i know this is a bit off my original topic, however what specifically does "Plesk Update" actually update on the server as far as software? Any core OS stuff?

 

[hardweb]

It updates only Plesk dependencies.