After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.