It depends, of course. You've given us almost no idea of the scale of your operation. You could be looking for a nice midrange desktop-grade system with extra RAM, no monitor, a cheaper video card, an extra disk drive, and an external UPS, or you could be looking for a roomful of PowerEdge racks, and we can't tell the difference from what you've said.

You've also given us very little idea about the type of server you need. For serving static web content, you would mostly be concerned about disk space and bandwidth; CPU would be an almost total non-issue. OTOH, if these web servers need to run server-side dynamic stuff, which most do these days, then there are additional considerations. Since you asked on Perlmonks, I assume you'll be wanting to do a lot of Perl stuff on them, so that makes CPU somewhat relevant, and RAM becomes very important. RAM is even *more* important if there's a relational database involved (though it may be preferable, depending on your circumstances, to put the database on its own dedicated server and let the web server(s) talk to it over the network).

As far as price/performance ratio: once you get past a certain point, the ecconomies of scale are such that the cheapest way to get 2y performance is to use 2z servers, rather than one server with 2x performance. Of course, that requires some kind of load-balancing or round-robin DNS or something, which for a small network is more overhead than you want to mess with.

In summary, it depends very much on the details of your setup. If you need someone to hold your hand and walk you through evaluating that and making a decision, you may need to get a local consultant. You'll want someone who can go on-site with you and sit down and look at your situation on paper, as well as your facilities and infrastructure. But of course, that costs money, and it's probably cheaper to buy twice the hardware than you need, to be sure you've got enough, rather than hire a consultant to figure out exactly how much you need. But again, it depends on your situation, and the scale of your operation.

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

In reply to Re: OT: server vendors by jonadab
in thread OT: server vendors by j_c

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