Picture of new PAFOA servers

[danp]

$4,000 of computers needed to host PAFOA moving forward. 1 database server and 4 load-balanced web servers.

We haven't moved the sites over yet, but doug installed them yesterday. Hopefully we'll have the actual site moved over within the next week!

Just figured you guys might want to see what some of your donations go to, thank you for all your support! The fact that we NEED 5 servers to host the site is a very good sign about our growth.

[RocketFoot]

Awesome! Thanks Dan and Doug! You guys are doing a hell of a job!

5 servers should keep us growing for a while!

[40twist]

POWER!!!!!! "grunts like Tim the toolman Taylor"

[mojo]

Dan ... what a thing of beauty. Any specs (hardware/software) on those for us geeks on the board?

It's definitely a great thing to see. This is such a great forum.

[Zef_66]

With the way the site is growing, is this enough room for growth? I know nothing about computers, but just curious is this is enough server room for the current load? Or a projected load? And how long do you think until another upgrade is needed?

Just curious....

[danp]

Originally Posted by mojo

Dan ... what a thing of beauty. Any specs (hardware/software) on those for us geeks on the board?

It's definitely a great thing to see. This is such a great forum.

Dell PowerEdge 1850
Processors: 2 x Intel Xeon 3.2GHz / 1MB Cache / 800FSB (x 5)
Memory: 4GB PC-3200 ECC Memory (4 x 1GB) (x 5)
Hard Drives: 2 x 73GB 10K U320 Hot Swap SCSI (x 5)
RAID: PERC 4/DC RAID w/ 128MB Cache (x 5)
Power: 2 x 550W Redundant Power Supplies (x 5)
Software: Not Included
Rails: Rapid Rails or Versa
Front Bezels: Included
Warranty: 1 Year STI Limited Warranty

Originally Posted by Zef_66

With the way the site is growing, is this enough room for growth? I know nothing about computers, but just curious is this is enough server room for the current load? Or a projected load? And how long do you think until another upgrade is needed?

Just curious....

Currently we are maxing out servers of similar setup (1 database, 1 web) and the bottleneck is the web server. Once we get the site moved over we will be operating on 1 database and 4 webservers which should hold us over for a very, very long time I would imagine. The beauty of it however is everytime we get to capacity, we just pop in another server to do what we need. Since we're now actually paying for hosting, it's simply a matter of how much we need and can afford. How much we can afford is tied to how well we do with our advertising, subscriptions, and merchandise sales (once we start them up again)

Right now it will cost about $250/mo to host all this junk, we are about 75% of the way to being able to afford that (but we have enough money to float us until we do get there) I'm not terribly worried, but supporter subscriptions help a lot.

Everything that's happning here is a very good thing and I am very happy I decided to save almost all of the donations we've received over time because we were able to purchase the servers outright using funds we already had without breaking a sweat. We'll need to recover the cost at some point, but we didn't need to hold an emergency fundraiser.

[D-FENS]

Are Rich and Greg helping out with the load balancers?

[mojo]

Dan

Are these servers going to run FreeBSD and Apache like the current one? That's what the current one is running right?

Do you have a separate load balancer or will one or more of the webservers run pound or something like that?

[danp]

Originally Posted by mojo

Dan

Are these servers going to run FreeBSD and Apache like the current one? That's what the current one is running right?

Do you have a separate load balancer or will one or more of the webservers run pound or something like that?

Yes, FreeBSD/apache for the main setup, things like images/stylesheets will most likely be run through lighttpd as the system currently does.

Load balaning (for the short term) will just be round-robbin DNS. At some point I'd like to get us set up with a BigIP, but those cost some coin.

[KA3OYJ]

Looks like those at the helm know what direction we are going in and are taking the appropriate step to ensure we get there.
Thanks guys for providing this forum and for all your time and energy!!