Hardware What'd be good specs for a home webserver?

[Deleted User]

I'm not really all too interested in having a home server atm (i don't need it and i don't have the money for it right now), I'm just curious what specs people think would be good for a home server. Specifically a fairly high-traffic server.

 

[Nightwish]

You need to define "high traffic" in terms of requests per second and what those requests are for. If all you're serving is some text you have completely different requirements from serving big dynamic images, for example.

 

[FAST6191]

As Nightwish said you are going to have to define high traffic by amount and type. Suffice it to say though that a raspberry pi would probably outclass the average shared host so there is that.

 

[Deleted User]

Oh yeah. I should've thought of that when I wrote the post.
Maybe a forum that has quite a few users, and is pretty busy. (Though nowhere near as busy as GBATemp.)
The server would be running on Nginx, and would be using PHP and MySQL.

 

[Nightwish]

Quite a few is not a number, mate.
I don't dimension servers for a living, but I agree with FAST, a cheap raspberry pi (might as well go with the pi2) or a slightly better odroid should do the trick and save you a ton in power bills. A forum is not particularly intensive, but if you're going to have a few hundred posts a minute with some file hosting, an atom processor should be enough.

If you want to forgo having the server at home, I can recommend the "pay only what you use model" of nearlyfreespeech.net - I barely use it, so I barely spend any money with it , and I believe what they say about scaling a fair bit from there.

 

[Deleted User]

Quite a few is not a number, mate.
I don't dimension servers for a living, but I agree with FAST, a cheap raspberry pi (might as well go with the pi2) or a slightly better odroid should do the trick and save you a ton in power bills. A forum is not particularly intensive, but if you're going to have a few hundred posts a minute with some file hosting, an atom processor should be enough.

If you want to forgo having the server at home, I can recommend the "pay only what you use model" of nearlyfreespeech.net - I barely use it, so I barely spend any money with it , and I believe what they say about scaling a fair bit from there.

Sorry about that. I'm pretty horrible at thinking of exact numbers.
Anyways, thank you for answering.

 

[Insidious611]

Honestly web servers don't need *that* much in raw power. If you're handling high volume, you need RAM, and you need a decent ethernet chipset. That's about it.

Source: I was a netadmin for a startup hosting provider for 4 years.

 

[Nightwish]

Ah, yes, quite right about ram, depending on the forum software.
It's amazing how much processing power we have right now, I still remember playing my zx spectrum, that wasn't going to serve any web page.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

It also depends entirely on what you're using it for. If you're wanting to host HTML-based web pages then I'd recommend the cheapest processor that will go into your motherboard of choice along with as much RAM as you can physically stuff in the motherboard.
Like seriously, you'll want it to come cascading out of the case if you open it
Maybe even glue some RAM to the outside for extra stability

On the flip side, if you're wanting to host media of any sort I would recommend AT LEAST a quad-core processor so that you can transcode video output on-the-fly for whatever device is currently viewing it

 

[Insidious611]

Oh yeah, if you're doing media transcoding, or streaming, or anything like that you're going to want a decently beefy processor. I wouldn't say anything too much more powerful than an i3 still.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Oh yeah, if you're doing media transcoding, or streaming, or anything like that you're going to want a decently beefy processor. I wouldn't say anything too much more powerful than an i3 still.

Meh, in this case cores>GHz, so I'd still recommend a low-end i5 or something similar

 

[Insidious611]

True enough.