[alistairlee]

Hi, I'm new to server thingie.
I want to start a small web hosting business, but I really don't know what kind of HDD that I need for that kind of work.

- Let's assume I have about 10.000 registered users.
- I think mostly it would be read operation than write.
- my concern is affordability before perfomance or sweet spot between them. (remember this is new business, I'm not very sure to dump much money into this).

What HDD that I need? is 3.5" SATA enough? WD Velociraptor? or do I need SAS? or SSD? should it be RAID-ed?


Thx for your advice!

[continuum]

10,000 accounts on a single machine????

You're that heavily oversubscribed?!?! You're going to need all the I/O's you can get, as many Intel DC 3700's as you can afford!

I suggest you dive into some web hosting forums to see what kind of hardware other hosts are using, and what their oversubscription ratios are.

IIRC it often works out to more like 100 or 500 accounts per machine, so hope you can handle 100 machines...

[alistairlee]

lol, actually it's not like that.
as of now, I 'only' have few hundreds clients that using other company web hosting service.
then I think, why don't I start making my own web hosting service as complement to my own business.

so, usually one server (maybe dual Xeon or something like that) could only handle about 100-500 accounts?

and, which is better for that kind of job, SAS HDD (enterprise HDD?) or simple consumer grade SSD?

thx!

[continuum]

SSDs get you orders of magnitude more performance than even the fastest harddisk.

However, you may have capacity limitations to deal with, so YMMV... I am not sure how the balance works out in your particular scenario.