friend looking into buying/building a server for web hosting

[Perkomate]

hey guys.
one of my friends is a web designer, and also pays a company to host his own website on their servers. He was thinking about buying his own server and running that himself for the experience and because it'll be cheaper in the long run.
any tips/advice to do with these things? like, what OS to use (microsoft server, Ubuntu server, etc...?

thanks for any help

 

[Vampiric Rouge]

It depends on what you want to do and how many hits your site gets.

You can go the windows route us IIS, however that get get expensive with licensing.

You can go the linux route and do a lamp (linux, apache, mysql,php) stack or use nginx.

Either way depending on how popular your site gets you will start to have to worry about things having multiple hosting severs and multiple database servers all separate and clustered together.

With the though of needing multiple servers for clustering or at the very least having one dedicated to database you might want to visualize with an OS like VMware esx/i, KVM, or XEN.

 

[Perkomate]

ok, thanks. i'll talk with him about what he needs it for

 

[techdragon]

I run a LAMP server with Ubuntu. I find it fairly easy to manage after it's been initially setup. But like an earlier post stated it also depends on how much traffic his site's going to get. That will affect not only the number of servers and clusters but also what kind of computer he'll have to use.

I'm using an old Dell Inspiron because for my use it doesn't need to be powerful. But for his case it may need a whole lot more kick.