CPU

Your webserver should have plenty of processing power. In most situations, web servers will run Intel Xeon processors with anywhere from 2.0Ghz per core to 3.0GHz per core. The more cores and higher clock speed, the better.

RAM

RAM is important to the speed of your website. If you host one or more resource intensive website such as blogs, you’ll need more RAM to handle the high volume of customers your web server may receive.

SSD or Mechanical Drive

When it comes to storage, it’s very important to make the right decision early on to avoid having to migrate your website later. Solid State Drives (SSD) are much faster than standard mechanical drives. Traditionally SSD drives have less storage page, however, as technology improves, higher capacity drives are become more affordable. Ideally in a perfect webserver setup, you would have one or more SSD Drives, perhaps in RAID along with one or two mechanical drives. An ideal situation may be two 1 TB SSD drives in RAID0 and two 4 TB mechanical drives in RAID1 for backups/snapshots.

Network Port

Network speed is important as your web-server grows. Most datacenters may only give you a 100Mbps port. 1000Mpbs (1Gb) ports are becoming more common and usually included with most dedicated/bare metal servers. The higher your port speed, the more traffic at once your website can handle provided the datacenter can give you that much bandwidth.

Control Panel

Possibly the most important of all is a control panel. If you’ve ever setup a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server, you also know the complicated setup and configuration process involved. There are many control panels available. The most popular one is called cPanel. Prices usually start around $15/mo depending on your server. The control panel will give you the ability to start, stop, remote, add, administrator an automate your webserver. If you’re a hosting company, typically your automated billing control panel would be setup to accept payments and automatically provision services.

Remote Hands

If you decide to co-locate your own hardware, you may also want to consider remote hands unless you have direct access to the datacenter, which in most situations you do not. Typical remote hands (a remote technician at the datacenter) will range from $50-150/hour depending on the facility/management company you go with.

Power

While power is not the biggest concern to deal with, as you add machines or larger machines to your infrastructure, you’ll need more power to handle larger machines or several smaller machines. Average wattage is around 200-500W per machine.

Hardware Replacement

This can be the painful part. What happens when your motherboard, CPU or even RAID card (which can exceed $1,500) stops working? In most cases, if you rack your own hardware, you would have to not only pay for remote hands to replace the card but also recover the data, you’ll also need to replace the motherboard.

What’s next?

Now that you have a better understanding of some of the costs associated with running a website server, you may want to talk with one of our sales experts to assist you in getting started with your first server and talk about plans to easily scale up.