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I'm looking to move my current websites from my host to my own webserver. I currently have 92 websites and I run a lot of cron jobs, which my host constantly complains about. We only get to use 60MB of memory, and I apparently exceed that far too often.

So... in building a webserver just for my own needs, I want to buy for the ability to own 1000 websites someday far in the future. I'm looking for where to start?

Should I just get a standards workstation.. since it will just be a webserver for me and not for a business? Should I install Linux, since most webservers seem to run this? What version of Linux? I have WAMP installed on my local computer right now, but I have a feeling I'll need a little more?

Any other helpful tips.. or a great book that someone has experience with, would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

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your question belongs on serverfault.com – Daniel A. White Feb 8 '11 at 0:33
If WAMP is fine for you, why do you 'feel' you need more? – GolezTrol Feb 8 '11 at 0:35
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 8 '11 at 0:39

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closed as not a real question by larsks, John Gardeniers, Jason Berg, Chris S♦, splattne♦ Feb 8 '11 at 12:17

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3 Answers

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If you want to go with something mainstream with good support, have multiple domains for your sites, only one routable IP address and the ability to expand upon it yourself, I would go with either your RHEL (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora - whatever you like) solution with apache or Microsoft Windows with IIS. This way you have plenty of support if you have any problems as well. Resources shouldn't be a big deal - just have a couple gigs of memory in the system and you will be better than great.

To be honest (and this is an opinion) when I have a site to host I go with Apache and plug all my domains in with the VirtualHost line in the httpd.conf and have their directories all setup and organized. It will be the simpler, cheaper, more secure (if you know what you configure) way to go.

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If you are using WAMP, you can install MySQL and Pearl, php, or python as well without much difficulty. The amount of sites hosted on your system won't matter just as long as queries and hit counts are not going through the roof... which may not happen anyway depending on your bandwidth. – Jason B Shrout Feb 8 '11 at 0:51
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up vote 1 down vote

The number of virtual hosts has relatively little impact on the size of the server (formerly I ran around 3000 sites on a cluster of 500MHz / 1GB boxes).

I'd strongly recommend running it on two physical boxes - even if you only have a single IP adderss (get a basic load balancing router). 2 cheap workstations will give you more availability and capacity than spending a LOT more on a server type box.

IMHO, Linux has huge cost and security benefits over MS based OS for this kind of application. You might also consider a BSD based system - but knowledgable people with BSD skills are a bit thin on the ground compared with Linux. Do contact your nearest LUG - most have regular meetings / mailing lists - and there are usually competent people about there who can help you get started for a nominal fee - or beer. But do make sure they document all accounts created and details of external access.

What version of Linux?

If you don't have a preference, then see what they suggest - personally I'm not a fan of Ubuntu - it just does so many things differently from a conventional Unix system. But that still leaves lots of choice. Talk to the LUG - and see if they've got good reasons for prefering one distro over another.

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If you want to host 1000 websites now then you will want a reasonable server.

But, I wouldn't work on maybe's. Suggest you start off with an inexpensive low cost server or even a second hand one.

Then install ubuntu and xampp. This installs php, apache mysql perl for you. http://librenix.com/?inode=10021

You could play around now with xampp on an old PC.

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