[TYPO3] tell me about servers, and let me know what server I should purchase for my typo3 site

[Jason A. Lefkowitz]

dave typo wrote:
> I am not maintaining the server, there is an office that maintains all
> the servers for everyone within my building. They will maintain it.

I'm not sure that you and Dmitry are using the word "maintain" in the 
same way.

Typically an IT group will "maintain" a server in the sense of "we will 
make sure that it's running" -- i.e. that the power doesn't go out, that 
the Internet connection doesn't go out, and that the hardware doesn't 
fail (or is speedily fixed if it does).

What Dmitry is saying is that there's another level of "maintenance" you 
need to think about -- not just keeping the server running, but tuning 
it for ideal performance.  When you're talking about low end servers, 
the tuning you do will impact performance far more than any differences 
between, say, an identically configured HP and Dell.

That being said, here are some basic guidelines that I'd use:

* You don't say the level of traffic you're expecting this site to get. 
  For a small web site, just about any dedicated server you can buy 
today  will have more than enough resources to host TYPO3 acceptably. 
For high traffic/high availability scenarios, hardware becomes more 
important.

* Don't worry about the CPU in the server -- the big bottlenecks in 
server applications are typically memory and disk, not the CPU.  You 
want a system with fast hard disks and fast memory.  Redundant hard 
disks for RAID should be on your list as well.

* Don't try to "upgrade" a desktop PC into a server.  Servers are built 
around a completely different set of requirements -- high availability. 
  You can build your own "whitebox" server, but you'll be looking for 
different parts than you would if you build your own PC.  (This is less 
true than it used to be -- you can build a server these days using SATA 
hard drives, just like a desktop, for example -- but still worth keeping 
in mind.)

All that being said -- US$4K is on the high end for a Web server, though 
not extravagantly so.  You can get a decent 1U server from HP with 4GB 
RAM and two 160GB SATA hard drives for about $2,500 these days, and that 
should be more than sufficient for serving a single low to mid-traffic site.

Hope this helps!

-- Jason Lefkowitz