[SGVLUG] Linux based web-server appliance

[Dustin Laurence]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 06:36:13PM -0700, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> > -----Original Message----- Of Joel Witherspoon
> >
> > I work for a school district and we are looking to host
> > our own website and many years and dollars with an provider.
> 
> (I presume you meant "and SAVE many dollars instead of paying a
> provider...")

Keep in mind that what you'll be doing is trading time and knowledge for
money.  That's fine, provided both are available.  If not, consider
getting one of the $10-$20/mo. hosting services and pay them to spend
time getting the server back up after a hardware failure.  Keep in mind
that you still have to pay for the bandwidth.  On the other hand, if you
buy the pipe then you don't have bandwidth charges.

> > Besides the Cobalt servers, what other type of linux based
> > web server appliances are out there?
> 
> Any cast-off PC for starters ;)  [Well, maybe not the ones David is
> using if you expect a significant amount of traffic -- then again,
> serving plain static pages doesn't take much effort...]

It takes very little to run a website, though it depends on what you
want to host.  If it is static HTML then you can probably buy an NSLU2
for $100, install Linux, and pay very little in power as well.  If you
use an old PC you'll be paying a noticable power bill (for a home--for a
school it might well be *way* below the noise).  If you want to run a
Plone site, well, you can probably do it on a not-too-old desktop PC but
not on a little nas device!

Judging from my own experience at home, if there is money to invest up
front it will probably pay off in a couple of years to invest in a lower
power machine (say based on a Via chip or even one of the desktop
Pentium-M boards).  But I bet logic has nothing to do with it.  If the
school doesn't question the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a
month it must take to power a school each month but won't cough up a few
hundred dollars for hardware, definitely go with cast-off PC gear and
totally ignore power costs.  That's the hand they dealt you.

> Do you have any metrics from your current site?  [pages and/or bytes
> transferred per month, day, hour]  Is the site heavy with server-side
> "stuff" [java/perl CGI's, databases, etc.]  Do your site developers use
> proprietary design tools (ASP) [I presume not, since you're asking about
> linux based servers, but it never hurts to check...]

I totally agree with this--the big thing is to get a very good idea of
what you expect from this server.  Who writes the website?  Talk to them
first of all!  Know your bandwidth targets and exactly what server
software you have to run.  Also reliability expectations--if heads will
roll if there is downtime, then someone has to pay for failover or
better hardware than old PCs.

If none of these answers are known, then perhaps you don't know enough
yet to do the job right?

Dustin
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