I was wondering a few things.

1. Once you get a server, and double the memory, can you double it again?

2. What are some good servers for forum hosting? In perl. NOT php.

You should be able to. Just make sure that adds up to an amount within the amount accepted by the motherboard.


It pretty much depends on how much traffic it will get. I would start off with something modest in price and upgradeable, like a Pentium 4.

Can you give me some stats on some servers please?

Also, when i get a server, how to i get to host on it?

Don't take this the wrong way, but your question makes me want to ask you first: why exactly do you want a dedicated server? Have you already outgrown shared hosting?

On one hand having your own server(s) gives you great freedom and opportunity for growth. But on the other, it also brings the burden of supporting yourself, watching over the server(s), doing and watching backups, continuously keeping things up to date, fixing any bugs that arise with the software you're running, etc. etc.

The easiest way to pick a new server is to look at your existing resource usage, what's ample and what's running in short supply, and then make a best guess on the amount of growth you expect and want to be able to handle in the next year or two or before you want to add additional servers or upgrade the server. Can you give some more information about what you're running currently in terms of software and hardware, what traffic you have now and expect, etc.

Never mind now. Me and my paretner are starting with the $89 a month. But is there any way i can get a back up server? We cant be spending too much more money.

You could find one of those hosting companies that oversells and use a shared package as backup storage.

I did that for a while and it worked out ok (stored 20 GB on their huge disk space plan for under $10/month)

Another good option is http://www.bqbackup.com/ or their reseller http://www.rsyncpalace.com/ which gives you remote space to rsync an incremental backup to.

Another good option is the Planet's NAS service for simple FTP space.

I also used disksync for a while and enjoyed the service, though I didn't really make use of it in a complex enough fashion to justify the powerful incremental + differential system which takes some time to get comfortable with. I know you said affordable, but if your data set isn't huge, it could be a nice option for you.

I personally use R1Soft's CDP and love it to death. There's nothing better than being able to keep your processors available for your customers and using a friendly web interface.

R1Soft's CDP sounds great and it's a great value if you have a number of servers to backup. But

I don't think the planet-offered version at least is in the ballpark for backing up a single $89 server

Is it possible if i download it to a disk of my own. And if it crashes, I load that disk to the server?

You mean a local harddrive that you have?

If I understand correctly, you could definitely backup your data to a local computer if you have a nice fast internet connection (on the upload side in case you need to recover).

The R1Soft solution Mark mentioned is slick because you can do complete system backups so if the server crashes you can do a restore to exactly the way it was. I'm not aware of an "on the cheap" way to do this to a local system. But you could definitely backup your data to a local drive the same as to NAS. Or if you have a local server/computer that is capeable of rsyning to you can do incremental backups to it. Just make sure to calculate how long it would take you to restore the data over your internet connection should you need to reload following a server drive crash/server OS reload.

I have a 100MBPS connection that is over 99% reliable. But im not really sure what kind of disk i should use or how to download the server info onto my disk. Any suggestions?

Just buy a harddrive that matches your server's drive. You'll have to install an FTP protocol on your computer and use port forwarding on your router, than have your control panel FTP the backups.

Wow -- nice!

The kind of disk doesn't really matter at all.

What OS are you running on the server? Control panel?

Is backing up your data sufficient, or do you want to do something more advanced and quite difficult? (most probably just backup their data and if the worst happens, order an os reload, reharden the os (removing unneeded services, installing intrusion detection, firewall, lock down permissions, etc.) reconfigure services, and reinstall the backup data)

How often do you want to backup your data and what retention do you desire (since you have ample bandwidth).

E.g. "on the cheap" with an old computer and $99 500 GB drive, you could rsync to incrementally backup to a local system weekly and then simply archive (tar.gz) the backup directory monthly to keep x-months of "snapshot" backups in case you ever need something "as it was".

I'm sure there is a more elegant solution, but if you have an old computer or $99 drive this could easily get it done quite sufficiently.

BTW, I was just going through my bookmarks and deleting the old ones when I ran across this page on R1's site with a free trial. Since I brought it up earlier, I thought it would be good to put the link out there.

Me and my friend got it figuered out now. Thanks for your help!

Awesome!

P.S. what's your 100 mbps connection and what does it set you back a month? That's seriously fast (except for those who live in a datacenter, for whom it would be so every-day )

Yeah, I wouldn't mind having a couple of those...

My guess is Verizon FIOS.

Well, I where I live we have a wireless high speed thing. It is only 40 dollars a month.

Not to doubt you, but if you're truely getting 100 mbps over wireless for $40/month that's the fastest and best deal I've ever heard of anywhere in the country.

I thought even FIOS was only at 50 mbps down / 20 or 30 mbps up; I read that wimax is capeable of 70 mbps at extremely close distances, but in practice would deliver much much less than that over any distance.