XServe for for Web Hosting

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Level 4

2,664 points

XServe for for Web Hosting

I have a G4 Xserve that I am currently just using a a network drive more or less. And, after spending a couple of days on the phone with a web hosting provider I am looking at the Xserve and thinking why not host the site myself.

Anyone currently using an Xserve for web Hosting and if so, any suggestions?

24" Imac 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Sep 23, 2008 1:19 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 23, 2008 7:02 PM in response to Jeff Nitschke

The G4 Xserve should be fine for hosting a website. The real questions surround your current networking set-up:

-Do you have a fixed IP you can dedicate to the webserver box.
-Do you have adequate uplink speed at your location.
--Will a spike in bandwidth suddenly cost you more money?
-Is the website mission critical? If a backhoe cuts through your DSL/Cable/T1 connection and it takes two weeks to fix what will you do? Will it harm your business?

Assuming you have good answers to all these questions there's no reason you can repurpose the G4 to host a website for you.

HTH,

=Tod

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Answer 2

Jeff Nitschke Author

Level 4

2,664 points

Sep 23, 2008 8:10 PM in response to Tod Kuykendall

My though would be to run a G4 Xserve at my current location and a second machine running 10.5 server for latency at the clients location. I was just curious of any quirks one may run into hosting a site on a Xserve.

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Answer 3

Sep 23, 2008 9:18 PM in response to Jeff Nitschke

OS X Server comes with Apache bundled - the most common webserver there is so it's pretty straightforward. Every platform has its own quirks and things you need to know but for a basic website you simply turn on webserving and replace the contents at /Library/Webserver/Documents with your website. You can configure virtual hosting with several sites differentiated by name and/or port if you want. The GUI will get you most of the services you want to configure (including Apache modules) but if you really want configure your site set-up you might need to edit the conf file by hand - but that's true of pretty much any Apache install.

If you want to install and build the latest Apache release there are some hoops you need to jump through and some services you might break on the backend (like if your mailserver is using webmail) but all those things are pretty well documented. You don't say what version of the OS you're running but I'd recommend upgrading to 10.4 if you're on 10.3 if you're at all serious about it.

HTH,

=Tod

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Answer 4

MLNNASH

Level 1

35 points

Sep 27, 2008 5:27 AM in response to Jeff Nitschke

10.5 Is extremely capable of hosting, and very competitive to any other OS.
The actual software running most websites is Apache, which is included in OS X.

We have a team of three web servers, all on 10.5.5. Our primary web server hosts over 12O sites, our second web server has more than 50, and our third server hosts our media content for the first two servers. Our main web server handles more than 300 simotaneous page requests with 8GB of RAM.

If you website needs more than Apache, MySQL, and PHP, you may want to check search the web for Tenon . It is a website manager that makes deployment easier.

Example Site:
http://imagespueblo.com

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