Gabriel Wicke wrote:
It's very likely that we could get much more cpu power for the money by buying nine modest 2Ghz machines rather than five 2.6Ghz Pentium4 with RAID.
Well, the lowest machines that I can find widely available are 2.4Ghz... the state of the art these days is 3.2Ghz. Upgrading from a 2.4Ghz to 2.6ghz is only $28 per CPU (for the celerons).
Do you know of a vendor where I could buy 9 2Ghz machines for the price of 5 2.6Ghz machines? Or was that just a hypothetical example?
Someone offered to let me in on their deal with a vendor for last-generation Pentium III boxes, at $800 each. For simple webserving, does it make sense to look at those? Obviously we could get twice as many of those for the money...
At some point, of course, the management of a lot of servers becomes a hassle. But I don't suppose there's much difference between managing 6 identical webservrs and 12.
--Jimbo