What should I look for in regards to hardware for my site?

[JJohnston]

Depending on the requirements of your website, there are many answers to this question. Here are some of the most important factors to consider.

CPUs Obviously, the speed of the CPUs of your server will affect its ability to serve your website. Depending on the size of your site, and its load on the system, it may be beneficial to have multiple processors available to better accommodate the workload.

Memory For the most part, web servers are inherently very memory intensive. This means that memory is a valuable commodity when it comes to hardware requirements. If your dedicated server runs on a windows platform, then much additional memory must be allotted for, since the windows operating system itself is very memory intensive.

Mirrored Drives To ensure data redundancy, most dedicated hosts offer drive mirroring, which in essence keeps two sets of hard drives in sync with all of the data for your website. In the case of a drive failure, the system will experience no downtime since it has an immediate backup it can use until the broken drive is replaced. This is an excellent add-on feature for dedicated hosted sites.

Multiple Servers Depending on the requirements for your website, it can sometimes be very beneficial to host your site on more than one server. For example, if a website includes an integrated database it would be recommended to host the database on it’s own server. Separating the processes will enable one server to concentrate on processing web requests, while the other concentrates on database activity. This kind of segregation has immediate impact on the performance of a website.
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JJohnston
john@ultimate-hosting.com
Ultimate Hosting & Website Design