Running on a Dedicated Server

Make that $500 a month. The AMD64 is actually more than enough, with a goos Apache+mySQL tweaking, unless of course we’re running some Web 2.0 apps like MeasureMap or BackPackIt.

I can only dream of getting a 4 x AMD Opteron 842 with RAID 5 on SCSI drives for my blogs. :D

Yep, load balancing on mulitple servers. Last time I heard PEX has Celeron 3 servers (1 webserver and 2 mySQL servers).

If you go with bigger sites like AnandTech or WebHostingTalk, they load up as many half a dozen Xeons just to be able to handle over 2,000 concurrent users.

I didn’t know there were so many levels of RAID!

# Level 0 — Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

# Level 1 — Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.

# Level 2 — Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.

# Level 3 — Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.

# Level 4 — Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.

# Level 5 — Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.

# Level 6 — Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.

# Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.

# Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.

# Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.

# RAID S: EMC Corporation’s proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems.