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I am pricing some new servers and I am not sure which configuration to get. The server will be running several web applications for our company. Some of them are ASP.Net sites and some are ColdFusion.

The OS will be Win Server 2008 Web or Standard Edition.

Do I need 2 processors or will a single quad core handle it? Xeon multi core Hyperthreading or non Hyperthreading? I am going 64bit so I can go higher than 4 Gigs of Ram.

I am shopping at Dell and there are so many options, I want to get the most bang for my buck without going over budget and I also don't want the machine to be mostly under utilized.

  • Shopping Questions are Off-Topic on any of the [se] sites. See [Q&A is hard, lets go Shopping]http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping) and the [FAQ] for more details. – Chris S Jan 20 '13 at 14:23

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Couple of websites regardless .net or django can be handled quite well with computers that can't run a Vista. Real question is how much load those websites are going to get.

I recently have been through similar problem, my solution was,

Server: Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5520 - 2.26GHz (Nehalem) - 2 x 8MB cache w/HT Ram: 12 GB DDR3 Registered 1333 with Raid 1 2x 500 SATA

I will install XenServer on it (it's free), and run websites in VMs so, if you see one website is doing good or other is bad, you can allocate resources accordingly (give one VM more Ram, take from other) You can put your MSSQL on another VM etc.

Important consideration is getting the Nehalem processor, as it is recommended by Xen. Of course you don't need to buy so much ram that I bought, we have 2500 light weight websites running on the machine, and for those 4GB Ram is sufficient. Rest is for our other servers like mail, mysql, etc.

Without virtualization, most of your resources will be wasted on a single machine, and backing up, monitoring tasks will kill you. Of course, if your site is getting millions of hits a day, that's totally different story. I assume you are not facing that problem yet (otherwise you'd be looking for a cluster of servers instead of one).

Hope it helps.

Devrim
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