My organization currently uses a third party for .NET hosting. They have a web farm set up with load balancing and real-time failover across two web servers. The third party also does the administration and monitoring of IIS and the server for us.
In general this model works but we have had some service issues with the third party, and I'm trying to convince my bosses (but also myself) that we could get our own server in house and do the configuration and monitoring of IIS ourselves and save money and have better service.
So, the first step of this is for me to figure out what size server we would need to purchase. How much RAM should it have? Processor power? # of processors? Etc. Also, do we really need two servers load balanced, or would we be just fine with one server?
How should I go about answering these questions? How do you size an ASP.NET web server? Assume I can get the necessary data such as requests / second, average size of response, etc. Are there guidelines from MS on this?