Which Server to Get....?

[fab5freddy]

I am considering to start a hosting service, and basically have to choose between: Mac OS X, Linux, or something else completely......

What should i get for my new hosting service...?

thanks for any advice !

i will be using it mainly for storage for large photo and video files
and some web hosting.....

 

[Cabbit]

linux is the standard for servers, mac os server is not as capable as linux nor dose it have as much support

 

[GroovyLinuxGuy]

linux is the standard for servers, mac os server is not as capable as linux nor dose it have as much support

I would have to agree that you should get a linux server. That being said, I have to admit that I have never used a Mac server but I would think that having the GUI on it would be a waste of cpu cycles. The advantage of linux servers is easily found by google-ing it so I won't blather on about it. If you do need/want to have a gui to mangage your linux servers, I would recommend Webmin and not installing any window managers (though really...just learn the command line stuff, it is not as hard as you would think). Currently the company I work for runs debian linux on roughly 95% of our servers (we do have some windows servers, but they are limited in what they do (and being the lazy admins that we are, have found that in at least on case it's easier to do something on windows than on linux, not to mention that we can have the windows admins do the work and not us...now where is that remote control missle launcher again??))

Above all, I would definately not recommend using Windows servers. I don't really have too much problem with Windows per se, I just have not seen a windows server that was as solid and have the uptime that a linux/unix server does.

Oh, and I highly recommend debian linux or Ubuntu for your OS on the server, in that order. Ubuntu does have one advatage over Debian in that you can download a server edition that will let you set up a LAMP (Linux, Apache,Mysql, PHP) server in one go. With debian you have to install packages one at a time ( not that this is a time consuming effort).

Anyways, good luck

Cheers

 

[Cromulent]

Solaris is a very good option if you want something different to Linux, and it is free as well .

 

[ChrisA]

Could you tell us a little about what this system will host. Are are the pages from one company's site. Different customers mixed on the same host. How much bandwidth did you buy (what kind of connections to the Internet) How important to you is it that this server stays up. How long of a down time can you stand if it does? How much data will you have? Other than HTTP what kind of back end services will you offer? DBMS, PHP,....? And then the biggest question: How much web traffic do you expect? Will this grow over time? What about maintenance? Will there be someone on-site 24x7. Do you need remote access? How will fix this when if breaks?

If you get advice from someone who does not know the answers to these questions that person is guessing. Tell us about what you need and you can get some advice tailored a bit for you needs.

The OS is one part of the larger system. First you might want to sketch out your hardware requirements and decide if you need any fail-over capability. But generally people use Either Solaris, Linux or BSD.

 

[Cabbit]

i recommend suse linux enterprise server. real easy to configure and one of the old linux distros with novel backing and a solid code base. Always been a fan of suse especially when they were german. And in experience seems to have the best driver support.

 

[fab5freddy]

we are a in the photo advertising industry, and most computers in the company are Macs......

Does that matter, that the servers are Linux and all other computers are Macs..?

we are hosting and storing large RAW files and PSD's

 

[GroovyLinuxGuy]

we are a in the photo advertising industry, and most computers in the company are Macs......

Does that matter, that the servers are Linux and all other computers are Macs..?

we are hosting and storing large RAW files and PSD's

Nope doesn't matter if they are linux servers at all. I admin our linux servers at work from both a linux workstation, or when I am at home/elsewhere from my Mac using Terminal.

 

[fab5freddy]

ok, so people are not Mac Biased, Since this is a Mac Forum ??

is it a pain to learn Both Linux & Mac OS X Servers or
should i stick to just One ??

thanks!

 

[GroovyLinuxGuy]

I would stick with just learning one and learning it from the command line. If you learn linux, you should have little to no trouble transfering those skills to the command line of a mac server and the same goes for the other way round. I still vote for the linux server with a really big hard drive (maybe RAID would be a good idea in this case to, or at least a pair of linux servers for redundancy...never hurts to have a backup server). Although I would go the debian route for an os (less services turned on by default = more secure server) I have used SuSE in the past and agree that it is a good OS and easier to use quite honestly.