Sub £100 Linux Webserver

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Ok guys, say I wanted a webserver, cheap as possible. Its not going to be a high-impact server (maybe 10 people accessing it at any given time), and needs to be as cheap as chips. Requirements are:

• Compact: Needs to take up as little space as possible
• Silent: Needs to be as silent as is possible
• Needs to have a low power output, or as low as possible (I hate leaving pcs running when im not in the house - paranoid really)
• Graphics/sounds aren't a priority - any access to the machine will be remote.
• I'd like some form of redundancy maybe (mirroring perhaps?), but to be honest I could do without it.

How cheap do you think you could do such a server for?

 

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What kind of content do you plan on serving?

 

Actually, primarily it would run an instance of OpenRPG+. But I would likely play around with some php stuff and host it on that.

 

The PHP stuff doesn't take a whole lot of horsepower to serve. I have no idea what the specs are for OpenRPG as I'd never seen it before. I think your best bet in that area would be to ask in their forums what you would need for server specs for the number of clients you'd be hosting.

 

to be honest, its fairly low end. I ran the server component on one of the server2k3 installs mentioned in the other thread. Was an old desktop, running two server OS'. Reckon if it can run as a php webserver reasonably, it will be able to cope with the openrpg stuff too.

 

Then I would just look for an old desktop with reasonable specs and use it. My Apache server is a 1 ghz Pentium III with 684 megs of ram, and it serves php content pretty easily as I have Joomla site on it and serving Joomla content barely shows in top. It does have to strain a little when serving https content though.

I don't run a gui on it so most of its resources go to serving content. It's an old IBM eServer model 8479 in a mid tower case.

 

You could try a cheap NAS solution like this...

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

It's never gonna fly but it will be cheap and low power...

 

Dell currently have on offer a very basic "server" for £99 + VAT with free shipping

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/174111/dell-poweredge-server-117-free-deli/

Add another 160gb sata drive, upgrade to the 1st xeon, 2GB ram and the SAS controller, raid 1 for £367.78

 

He's not building a windows box madman (sorry couldn't resist)

 

I'm wondering if a VPS might be a viable solution. Found this.

Its sub-£100 (well, per year at any rate works out at 60 quid), avoids my paranoia issues, and it has the advantage that if the hardware dies, I dont have to worry about fixing it, they can do that.

Its better than web hosting, since i can (i assume) run applications on it, etc.

 

If you're going to look at VPS solutions give these guys a look. My brother has dealt with them for several years and never had a problem with them. They run CentOS on their servers, at least that's what they told me about a year ago. They were moving to it after Fedora stopped supporting their all but their current releases.

http://www.simplywebhosting.com/plans-vps/index-vps-x64.shtml

 

Find a 1st generation used Xbox, put a spare drive in it, and POOF!

Perfect, cool running, proven design and cheap

 

cheers for that. will take a look at them.