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I am planning to start my own shared server running LINUX and PHP and MySQL. What are the minimum hardware requirements to get things running?

Edit: The server will run INNO_DB based databases, needs to serve at least 10,000 unique daily visits, and handle peak loads of approximately 300 visits/second!

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I would like to say there are no stupid questions. But...why would you plan on getting into this business with little to no experience (based on the nature of your question)? – GregD Apr 11 '11 at 13:27
i'm planning to start my site on my own server ! – Sourav Apr 11 '11 at 13:28
"NOW WHAT?" now what to do ? where to start ? ... – Sourav Apr 11 '11 at 13:29
I can run those things from my cell phone or a ten year old desktop computer. Literally. The question is how much load could they handle? What kind of sites will you host and how much traffic do you need to serve? You need to specify those requirements before this question is answerable. – Caleb Apr 11 '11 at 13:30
One unoptimized query can bring down a high performance server. The only way to know your requirements is to setup the server and monitor it. Most experienced developers can intuitively guess the requirements. But that intuition is based on their in-depth knowledge of their application. – gAMBOOKa Apr 11 '11 at 13:41
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3 Answers

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what will be the lowest hardware requirements to get things running?

How many horse powers does a car need?

Same answer:

DEPENDS ON REQUIREMENTS.

You dont state any. Which emans likely my mobile phone has too many horsepowers. How much traffic? Waht IO do you need? How much ram do you need? YOu have to tell us, not we you. We dont know your application.

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truthfully, you can run a LAMP stack on an embedded mips processor at 200mhz with 16mb of ram or less... (yes, I've done it) It runs like crap... but it did work. As for Sourav's provided stats on usage... how many unique visits & number of visits per second are very moot. In most cases, the MySQL instance will be the biggest hog of resources and that depends on other requirements like the number of rows in tables, the number of indexes, and the number of queries being run per second. Apache & php typically sit idle waiting on the database. (assuming your code is well optimized) – TheCompWiz Apr 11 '11 at 13:44
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So, as TomTom said, the answer depends greatly on your requirements, and they don't seem very well-defined. Do you know what your requirements look like in detail, or is this still in an exploratory phase? Do you have hardware already available for use, or are you planning purchasing?

If you're still trying to determine your requirements, and especially if you'd need to buy hardware, I'd strongly suggest experimenting on a "cloud" provider like Amazon EC2 before trying to build on your own hardware. This will allow you to try several different levels of service to get a rough idea of your needs. I've done this kind of experimental scaling several times myself, and while it doesn't always translate 1-to-1, it's often been helpful.

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For what purposes it will be used?

  1. Video streaming
  2. File Storage
  3. Some news page
  4. Havy load pages with images/flash etc
  5. Clear text/css/java pages that can be easy cached with some tools

Please give some details.

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light weight social network with very little amount of picture – Sourav Apr 11 '11 at 14:37
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