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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Leopold" data-source="post: 181712" data-attributes="member: 758">as an ex sysadmin for some big companies I would point you in the direction of Anandtech.com and do a search on their recent (1yr ago) server upgrade. From that you will see what it is that a website and a forum board need to operate, and yes they are 2 seperate entities and should be handled as such.Web servers: These pieces of equipment require flexibilty and speed. The load changes from time to time and the faster cpu you have to do the processing the better. Hard drive pages are constant but usually small (web pages are around 100k or less on avg.) but there are allot of them so the hard drives take a beating. Avg memory for a web server should hover around 500-1gb of Ram. Dual cpu's are recommended but 1 fast one (1.2+) can handle the load. Redundancy in the machines and load balancing help ease the burden off the usage, after all you can service more people with less taxing if you have 2 machines doing the work. Overall you just need something that is not unholy fast but something that is: stable,  constant, and has excellent usage of resources. Message board: This is the mother of all servers. The hammering of the hard drives and the furious churning of the cpu's makes having a mutli-cpu (2-4) with lots of memory and fast (SCSI) hard drives a must. HardOCP put in  multiple dual P3 pc's with 1GB of Ram each and several SCSI RAID (Redunant Array of Inexpensive Disks) setups to handle the 10's of thousands of messages per day. The key with these is the multiple CPU's and lots of memory. The more you throw at this the better you are. 1GB min in memory is plenty but your HD's should be in some sort of RAID array to increase reliabilty and performance. I would suggest Dual or Quad CPU's for this.OS: Your operating system is like the driver in your car, if you have a bad driver, no matter how fast your car is you might not be able to handle it. Regardless of the propogand M$ puts out, there are more UNIX web servers out there with greater uptime than any M$ box out there.  Check out this link to see the difference:<a href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html" target="_blank">http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html</a>Unix may be user unfriendly at first, as M$ GUI makes life easy to setup and configure, but the reliabilty and uptime that it gives you makes it well worth the plunge in running UNIX over Microsoft products.the lesson to be learned is: More is better, but understanding what you want to do and grow is key. I don't know what price tag the new server is, but you can go on ebay, pick up some Company or Sun machines for realatively 1/5 the cost (DoveBid.com is better) and use them in your own datacenter that you host in your own town. I just recently setup a ISP with several Dell Servers running Win2k and RHat. The redhat's the main web server while the win2k is running mail, and IIS only apps. This is to prevent those pesky IIS virus' that come along and to increase performance and uptime.   Before I would go ahead and buy something from someone, I would get a quote from a competitor and see how that price stacks up against another. I don't know what brand of server morrus' company uses, if it's home built and they charge an arm and a leg I would question why. If it's a prebuilt OEM system from Dell, HPQ, or IBM it would make sense (HPQ=HP+Compaq). But take a word of advice and shop around.Questions, comments, and conerns feel free to email me. PS. If anyone's hiring in Florida and needs a sys admin with years of on the job exp and several certs I am available <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> will work for D20!</blockquote>

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