At Sitestash we can’t stand having really out of date hardware, we’re always looking at new servers to grow with. It’s a bit more costly to stay on the forward side of the performance curve in hosting. It’s not uncommon to find a “we don’t care as long as we get paid” type hosting company who rent/lease the cheapest server they can find, start a company on it, and are still using the same half dead server 3 years later. Now don’t get the idea servers can’t preform well for 3 years, but in most cases those servers are off the shelf desktop parts, and never designed for a 24/7/365 data center environment.
We’ve been on Supermicro gear for years with almost zero failures. Some of us who have worked in data centers before have seen some of our older servers outlive 3-4 reincarnations of the low-end gear you’d find at a budget server provider. It’s more about profit margin than anything else in that case, a server with a $55 motherboard inside may die 3 times over, in the single life span of a proper $250 server class motherboard. Unfortunately the customer renting the server is the one who suffers through the failures of inferior hardware. We learned this lesson early on from working in local Atlanta data centers who did this, and that was way back when Sitestash was still running on Dell gear (which is still great hardware).
Our customer’s are our business, so the least we can do is give them the best hardware for their money. It cuts profits some, but what is a company without happy customers? A customer who rents a server and stays with us for the 3-4 years the server goes without having issues, will be much happier with us rather than renting a server at the budget provider with the server having some kind of major failure every 6-9 months.
This rule applies to our shared and reseller hosting, we lightly load the servers so if one ever has problems and fails it takes down a very small amount of our customer base. It also allows the server to run much faster under normal conditions, and results in no performance complaints. Try that on a hosting company who runs their entire business on one overloaded server.
So anyway it’s about that time for us to start changing out some gear. The lowest end server we have running right now is a P4 3.0, and it’s still as happy as can be. We’re looking into deploying sets of single CPU quad core Xeons and migrating sites over, but at the moment we’re still stress testing a quad core for temperature reasons. With most of our servers being 1U rackmounts cooling is very important, at the moment we have no issue running a dual core Xeon. We have found the right combination of cooling fans, CPU heatsink, and CPU fan to cool the quad core, and we’re really just waiting to see if we can make it have a meltdown before declaring it stable for production.
Probably in the next week or two we’ll begin rolling out our first batch of quad core hosting servers. Shortly after that, the same configuration will be available for rent as a dedicated server. We will be benchmarking the new servers as they go into live use, and since no extra sites are being added to the servers we actually expect the upgrade to be overkill.
These hardware upgrades go along with the launch of business.sitestash.com which is our answer to the demand of high-end managed hosting, and dedicated servers. Business class service of Sitestash will be separate from the normal hosting services, and will be geared towards mission critical hosting and extensive technical services.
