Colocate your own Server
Posted on Sep 29, 2009 by
Paul WhiteSo for years I stayed away from playing middleman with my clients. All the
websites I built were hosted on
shared hosting accounts, or a
VPS, or recently a
dedicated server. For years it was never an issue. The sites stayed up for most of the time, but recently some of my sites had problems. This resulted in hours of downtime, and multiple calls to the
hosting company to have them recycle an Application Pool, or reboot a server.
Shared and VPS hosting
When you are hosted on a
shared or
VPS box you come to accept slower performance, and occasional outages. These little outages cause you to live in fear. Fear makes you need the
hosting company. You think they know what they are doing, and you couldn't possibly learn how to do it for yourself. That and is it really worth it to invoice clients every month for $10. Kind of tedious if you ask me. But eventually your clients have grown and are paying $100+ each month to the
hosting company.
Hosting Company Support Flow
If the sites just ran, you would never have to call support. The only time you have to call support is when they go down. So if your website never goes down it really doesn't matter how bad the support is (
Godaddy ). But most
hosting companys have a support structure that works like this
- Customer calls Support
- Gets Automated press # for blah, ect..
- Phone Support Rep Answers the phone, and creates ticket with your problem
- Ticket is submitted into a queue of tickets that need to be resolved
- Middle level Support Tech, pulls up your ticket ( hours later, if you are lucky )
- Ticket is fixed
- You are notified, and if you find its not fixed, you start all over again
The problem is when all you need is a simple Application Pool Recycle, which takes 5 minutes tops. You will have to wait hours for this to be done. In the mean time your site will be down.
First Dedicated Server
When you finally have a client that is too big for the
VPS plans. You move them to their own
Dedicated box. You are then amazed but how stable it is. Of the two
Dedicated Boxes I have hosted at
Godaddy, Neither one has ever been down. A
dedicated box is like a tank, Its solid, and doesn't go down. Especially with the newer Server 2008 OS by Microsoft. After all the Operating System was designed to run 1 computer. When you start trying to virtualize systems ( like with a
VPS ) you get problems.
Ready to buy a server and colocate your own box
Getting your own
Dedicated box makes you believe, that you could acutally run your own box. So you goto Dell and HP to see how much servers cost. The truth is most web servers, don't need the latest hardware to run. The newer stuff just costs more, and maybe uses a little less energy. If you want to get max performance out of your server Hit up Ebay and start searching.
Building my own 1U Rack server
- $425
a 1U Rack Server is the cheapest thing you can colocate. So off to ebay I went to find a server that would get the job done. I settled on a SuperMicro SuperServer 6014-32h. The server was loaded nicely all for $425 shipped
- Dual Xeon 3.6 Ghz
- 4 x 1GB DDR2 Ram
- 4 x 73GB 10K SAS Maxtor Hard Drives in Hot Swap Trays
- Built in RAID support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
- Dual network ports
- CD-ROM Drive
- 3.5" Floppy Drive
Upgrades to the Server
Even though I could get away with using this server as is. I didn't want to find myself a year later having to upgrade it.
More Powerful RAID Card
- $269.51
I wanted to setup the
hard drives in
RAID 10 ( stripping and mirroring ) For the most speed and redundancy. Since the built in
RAID controller (Adaptec AIC9410) only supported
RAID 0 and 1. This would require upgrading the
RAID with a Zero Channel Add-on Card (AOC-SOZCR1). Unfortunately there were none for sale on ebay. So I had to google for one. I found one for a decent price at wiredzone.com.
Larger and Faster SAS hard drives
- $300 ( got lucky )
The drives that came with the server were only 73GB each. Once I put these in
RAID 10. I would only have about 136 GB of storage available to me. This was enough for now, but depending on what clients I host on it, this could potentially get tight on space. Plus these drives were only 10K RPM drives and the benchmarks were relatively slow.. I wanted faster drives. So I went with what I am currently running in my work station. Fujitsu 15K 146GB
SAS drives. I was actually on the fence about upgrading the drives, mainly because new drives cost about $190 each. But after searching Ebay, I found a seller that was upgrading their server, and had 4 Drives exactly what I needed for sale. I got lucky and was able to get these for $75 each. So $300 total for 4
Hard Drives. I was thrilled. A note about
SAS drives. Most
SAS drives are designed for 5 years of heavy use. With many
manufacturers warranting them for that time frame. If you are buying drives off ebay, always ask what the manufactured date of the drives are. This is printed on the top of the drive. The drives I got had a date of 2007. So at worst they got 2 years of heavy use. Keep in mind most servers don't fully utilize the drives. Big difference between 5 years in some guys web server, and 5 years sitting in a google server. I know guys running old SCSI drives and they are still going strong after 10+ years of heavy use. Also redundancy is very important.
Hard drives do go out. For this reason any production server should also have some sort of Mirror
RAID setup. Anything but
RAID 0. I recommend
RAID 1 or 10 to keep things simple.
Max out the memory
- $140
The server has 8 Dimm Slots, since I plan on running
Windows Server 2008 R2 ( 64 bit OS ) more memory is better. Lucky for me that guy who was selling the
hard drives also had 16GB of DDR2 memory for sale. More memory means you can run a very large Query Cache for
MySQL, which will greatly increase the performance of your machine. It also means you can cache your
websites to the server's memory speeding up your sites.
Upgrade the Optical Drive to a DVD-RW
- $30
The standard CD-ROM drive that came with the server works, but any newer OS needs a DVD for the install. Servers like these take slim drives. The same ones found in most laptops. Even if your server didn't come with a DVD-ROM drive, normally its just a matter of swapping out the old CD-ROM drive with a DVD-ROM drive and it just works. Got this off ebay, though you can buy them new for slightly more on newegg.com and other sites.
Bezel for DVD-RW drive
- $6
Unfortunately the drive I got had no front bezel and looks ugly. The bezel is for both looks and function as it protects dust from entering the drive in the wrong
places. So back to ebay I went to find just a bezel, thank god they were cheap
Operating System Windows Server 2008 R2
- Unknown ( estimated $459 )
If you are thinking about getting the new Server 2008 OS, I highly recommend you wait for Server 2008 R2. The difference between the two is Server 2008 is based on the Vista Kernel. While Server 2008 R2 is based on the
windows 7 Kernel. Server 2008 R2 also is the first 64bit only OS. Even though the names are similar they are very different
Operating Systems. R2 is not a upgrade patch to the the original. Its a whole new OS. They should have called it Windows Server 2010. But with any OS that has that different of a name, industry would resist upgrading to it, assuming that it wouldn't be stable until the first Service Pack was released. so by Calling it Server 2008 R2, makes it sound like its the server 2008 without the bugs. Also you might have noticed there are many different versions of Server 2008 R2. Web, Standard, Enterprise ext. If you are running a web server (
Websites,
MySQL, Stats Server, Mail, Server ), All you need is the Web Edition. If you need to run your DNS server to manage domains, you need standard edition. At the time of this posting, finite pricing had not been released yet, but judging by the prices of the original Server 2008, I doubt they will be any different.
The cost of Colocating your own server
This is one area that may confuse some. Some data centers charge a flat fee just for the rack space, then they charge you additional for the transfer, and then they charge you even more for power usage. This is designed to encourage people to upgrade to more efficient servers that don't require $500 watts to run. I got lucky and found a datacenter in downtown Houston called
Acronoc, which charges $50 to host a 1U rack server and only 5 cents / GB of transfer, with no power charges. So initially I will be paying about $65 / month for
colocation. This is a great price considering others wanted to charge me around $150 / month.
Server Investment
$425.00 Server
$269.51 Upraded
RAID card
$300.00 Larger Faster
SAS drives
$140.50 Max out RAM to 16GB
$30.00 DVD-RW slim drive
$6.00 Bezel for slim drive
$459.00 Windows Web Server 2008 R2 ( estimated )
$1630.01 Total Investment
WhiteSites Blog