When renting a server, what's the most important bit?

[Deimos]

I currently host a couple of VB forums and a hefty wiki+wordpress site.

What would you say is the most important hardware component for that kinda setup? CPU? RAM? Harddrive speed/type?

[royo]

Everything is important, you need to have a good CPU, enough RAM and a lot of I/O if you are using the HDD a lot of the time. Since you didnt mention any numbers or what you're hosted on right now its hard to make a recommendation.

[eUKhost.com]

Its hard to recommend anything. No. of websites won't determine the server specs you will require. You will need to consider server specs as per your usage requirements. Size of database and web files and no. of simultaneous users at a given point of time will help you to decide on server specs you require.

[xnetco]

I currently host a couple of VB forums and a hefty wiki+wordpress site.

What would you say is the most important hardware component for that kinda setup? CPU? RAM? Harddrive speed/type?

It really depends on the size of the forum. Even a fairly large forum can be virtualised (VM) and that has it's benefits. On a VM your likely to get access to faster processor, faster SAS drivers and better RAID.

Tim
www.vbulletinhosting.co.uk

[McJ]

I have a dedicated server from www.vbulletinhosting.co.uk (which is Global Gold's dedicated forum hosting arm) since around 2002. (I've been a customer since 2000). Our forum has 3.6 mil posts and 37,000+ members with peak time concurrency of between 400-500. The server is lightening fast, and we also host our main video-game magazine on the same machine.

To answer your question, the most important advice I would offer you is finding the right hosting company. I've been producing web sites since 1997 and had the fortune (or misfortune) of experimenting with many hosting providers (including some big names). I've found Global Gold to be the most durable, stable and professional during these years.

I have a HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server with Dual-Core Xeon Processors, 4Gb memory and 2 x 36GB SAS (SCSI) RAID HDD.

Good luck and best wishes.

[alemcherry]

A combination of all of them. Personally I have found that RAM makes a big impact as the forum gets more traffic. Processor is always important and SAS disks are needed only if you have tons of traffic.