I’ve been itching to start up a Boston-based dedicated server company. There’s surprisingly few options. As I dig around I’ve found a few that exist, but they’re practically unheard of. I want to start one up and do some good marketing. Name recognition is pretty big when it comes to dedicated servers. However, none of the people I’ve talked to so far (my mom) has been willing to give me the ~$100,000 start up capital I’d need.
I have slightly different plans for furnishing the racks I’d want in a colocation center, but there are plenty of good deals to be had on eBay, in case anyone’s in the server market.
- 1U Dell, dual 3 GHz Xeons, 1 GB RAM, 73 GB SCSI (10K RPM). $485 + $25 shipping.
- If you’d prefer disk space over disk speed, there are also 1U SuperMicro machines, a 2.8 GHz Xeon (dual-capable, but not so equipped), 2 GB RAM, and a pair of 250 GB disks. About $400 shipped.
- Comparatively expensive, but $1500 buys dual 3.2 GHz Xeons, 4 GB RAM, and 3x 146 GB SCSI disks.
- Not cheap at all, but dual quad-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 6x 146 GB disks is my type of machine! $5375 if you’ve got the cash burning a hole in your pocket… (It looks like these processors support VT virtualization, so you can run something like Xen on it and host multiple virtual machines, Windows or Linux, without problems.
- Dual 3.2 GHz Xeons, 4GB RAM, and a pair of 750 GB disks? $1277+58 seems like a pretty good deal!
When you start your company let me know and I’ll sign up as a customer. I’m actually looking for a new hosting service. THe one I have now is great and its free but there are minor strings attached.
I’m not quite sure of your needs, but if it’s simple webhosting, I have plenty of excess capacity on this machine… It just doesn’t run Windows. 😉
I need to decide what I really need and when. I want to move my email somewhere but I really don’t want to use one of the free services. I know I want to eventually move my “work” blog somewhere independent of the company I work for and I have to decide how best to do that. I’d like a place that could host wiki software though I don’t have an immediate use for one. I’d like to run Majordomo (which I think only runs on Linux) or something like that eventually. I don’t know many places that offer that as an off the shelf option.
I’m not sure I really need Windows though if I ever want to create something with real active pages I will probably need that. But not now.
I want to move my email somewhere but I really don’t want to use one of the free services.
Right now I’m just forwarding all my mail to GMail, and have been extraordinarily pleased. I’ve been meaning to set up POP/IMAP/webmail access, but haven’t seen a need since GMail works as well as anything I’d set up.
I know I want to eventually move my “work” blog somewhere independent of the company I work for and I have to decide how best to do that.
You’re welcome to host it here, if you want WordPress. (The software powering this.) Blogger.com and WordPress.com are two free hosted services; I think you can host a domain with them, but I’m not sure how it works.
I’d like a place that could host wiki software though I don’t have an immediate use for one.
Wikis are kind of like my knife and the habit of writing the date on any paper you write on — you quickly come to find that they’re way more useful than you expected. I don’t want to link to mine publicly (for fear of it being inundated with spam), but I use it to store practically my whole life. I’m running MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. (Same look and feel, too. You can theme it, but 99% of the time it’s just standard.)
I’d like to run Majordomo (which I think only runs on Linux) or something like that eventually.
I prefer Mailman. It’s what we ran back when we ran the FIRST mailing lists, actually. It’s the same concept, but with a GUI. (Demo here: BSGO is public, DemsBoard is a private one. I think it’s a fairly standard offering on shared Linux hosting plans. I don’t know what there is for Windows equivalents.
Oh, and given that the server rental is a sunk cost and I’ve got extra space, if you want some space to test stuff out, I’d be happy to accommodate you pro bono.
I don’t have FrontPage extensions enabled, though… Not sure if you do any FrontPage-proprietary stuff.
I don’t use FrontPage extensions. FrontPage is a dead product these days anyway. We should talk sometime.
I enjoy your writing style. Will you consider writing for my blog as a guest writer?
Well, given that your blog is about CPA review and my “writing style” that you like was a bulleted list, I don’t think it would work out very well.