Hosting help - Need advice on hardware.

[Lasher]

I have a lot of experience with Linux and absolutely no concerns on the technical side of managing a server, but very little experience with hosting.

I have acquired a site that gets around 2500 uniques a day in a niche market, has a 'top sites' script running that is the main focus of the site and a modestly active IkonBB forum - a few hundred posts a day. Bandwidth usage is anywhere from 1-5 gigs a day. Previous owner has the site on a fairly old Cobalt Raq4i with 512mb RAM.

Obviously every site is different and this is somewhat of a vague question, but based on the info provided would you say I need a small dedicated server or just a modestly sized VPS?

Also, what exactly do things like Plesk and CPanel do? If I'm comfortable editing apache configs, creating sql databases, etc from the command line and the server is for my own sites only with no reselling, so I need it?

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

Derek.

 

[Camron]

I would suggest you use a server with ServerCP, I have a lot of experience with it and it is a great control panel. After I tested it used about 12MB ram with a few users logged in. It's also pretty easy to customize.

About the hardware, a very simple dedicated server, or medium sized VPS would do you the trick. I am not familiar with IkonBB so I am not sure how much resource it would use. If the previous owner had 512MB ram, depending on what control panel (webhosting cp) you may not need that much if you went for serverCP.

SCSI drives work great for forums. I had a few larger sites up which consumed a lot of file downloading (images, and a lot of php processing) which needed a fast drive. SCSI should do the best for you in this situation.

If you have any further questions just let me know, I would be glad to help

 

[Lasher]

I would suggest you use a server with ServerCP, I have a lot of experience with it and it is a great control panel. After I tested it used about 12MB ram with a few users logged in. It's also pretty easy to customize.

About the hardware, a very simple dedicated server, or medium sized VPS would do you the trick. I am not familiar with IkonBB so I am not sure how much resource it would use. If the previous owner had 512MB ram, depending on what control panel (webhosting cp) you may not need that much if you went for serverCP.

SCSI drives work great for forums. I had a few larger sites up which consumed a lot of file downloading (images, and a lot of php processing) which needed a fast drive. SCSI should do the best for you in this situation.

If you have any further questions just let me know, I would be glad to help

Thanks Camron, rep added. Ended up getting a dual-core dedicated server at LayeredTech and added Cpanel/Fantastico. Will see how it goes.

 

[3011]

Thanks Camron, rep added. Ended up getting a dual-core dedicated server at LayeredTech and added Cpanel/Fantastico. Will see how it goes.

What was going on with your site?