Server Purchase

[hallsofvallhalla]

I have an opportunity to purchase 8 of these.

http://www.andovercg.com/datasheets/sun-fire-v120.pdf

Was thinking of buying them and running my own hosting shop for web games and such. Small time of course. I have not had time to investigate them. Anyone have any information on this? Ever done this?

The specs seem low, think I will be able to host enough sites for say $3 a month to pay for costs?

[hallsofvallhalla]

along the same lines, If I did put up a webhost would I get any takers at $2-$3 a month? What would you expect the specs to be at $2 a month?
Space?
SQL DBS?
Bandwidth?

[Chris]

16 VPS' at 256MB RAM per machine per month at $10 = $160*8 = $1280 gross profit per month. I don't know what software or licences you would need. I'm assuming anything to do with Linux would be cheaper if not free.

[SpiritWebb]

Hmmm...not sure, but will follow this post for sure!

[hallsofvallhalla]

interesting point Chris. Do you think those machines would be worth a flip with 2 VPS's on each?

[Xaleph]

Im inclined to say no, not worth the time and effort. Outdated machines, low performance and I doubt it will run high frequency requests on a scale you want it to. Even if you stash 4GB in each, it`s still running at only 133mhz so it`s not balanced out, 4GB is a overkill. Also, Solaris as your OS is a bad choice, Solaris is dead. Support for the OS stopped 2 years ago and even the Open Source variant: OpenSolaris is dead. Solaris 11 was the latest in their line which is dated to 2009? I`m not sure, but the OS is very old.

On a sidenote, the architecture is x86, so its only capable of 32bit instructionsets, so no fancy stuff you can do with it. You will also need to find a good OS that can run this hardware and it will take a lot of time to get driver support for Suns propietary hardware. If any at all, really.

So unless it`s all pre-installed definitely not worth the time, effort and money. I dont like asking this but what would it cost? If i may guess around 300 to 500$ right? A good and new server with a quadcore processor can be bought for the same money. However, i`ll bet you the new hardware will run faster then 8 SPARC machines. Not to mention all the extra benefits of the new hardware: scalability, x64 architecture, modularity, memory size and speed.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Thanks for the info!
The only reason I was considering it is because I can get 5 of them for around $400 total.

[Xaleph]

That would mean about 80$ each. I`m not sure, but even a small search on craigslist will render better results for 80$, meaning: computers in general, not server-specific. However, for the purpose of the argument it`s still valid because servers are computers. The only reason I would consider the SPARCs is if they work in paralels or better, raid formations. If one breaks down ( and chances are your first will die in the first month ) that everything is redudantly backed up on the other servers. If you can run RAID formations for HDDs ( which i doubt ) it`s worth considering but i highly doubt it. I`m not sure how old the servers are, but i bet late 04 or early 05. So there`s no SATA, no serialisation, no RAID.

Anyway, i believe it`s a gamble, because my experience with servers are that most will fail. Miserably. I recently got 3HP servers ( early 09 ) for 2 crates of beer, so no damage there. I also got 10 HDDs for 100eu, designed to be easily deployed for rack servers ( swappable ). The first server died 2 weeks after testing and installing software. The second server died 2 months later, power issue. The third is still alive. The harddisks were not as swappable as they made me believe, i already lost 7 HDDs so far. Maybe it`s my own fault, im no system engineer nor do i have any real experience operating and managing servers, but 2 fails in 2 months, 7 disks burned in less then a year..?

I since then became very weary of secondhand server gear. There`s allways a catch. Thats why i rather recommend buying a new server instead of 5 old ones. For the same money you can get a nice Dell rack or a HP rack, dual core, 4GB and all extensible and scalable. But it should be enough to host at least 50 sites. If you upgrade the ram to 12GB you can probably host around 100 sites on one server.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Thanks for the info and i think you are right.

[PKDemon]

if it was me i would find some desktop computers and set them up haha for hosting game servers and things