I was wondering if anyone could be able to tell me which of these selections would be best? This is my hosts options.... I need to choose one for hosting my website.

NT Servers feature Intel Pentium 4 1.4 GHz systems with a minimum of 1 Gig of Ram. Multiple processors, multiple Ethernet adapters and a server grade mainboard and chipset. Storage is spread across multiple Fireball hotswap hard disk drives using Adaptec RAID controllers.

Unix Servers feature Dell Poweredge Servers with each having a minimum of Dual PentiumIII Processors at 1.13 Ghz per processor. Minimum of 1gig of DDR random access memory. Multiple and redundant SCSI hardrives at a minimum of 10,000 RPMs per Harddrive. Redundant Powerful multiple Backbones.

i will go for unix, anyway, it's also depends on what files you are going to host

Well it matters.

If your site is a basic run of the mill static page, it doesnt matter much.

But if you are looking into dynamic pages, then it matters - if PHP or perl based, go for UNIX. If ASP/ASP.NET, then go for the win2k box.

It also matters which platform you feel most comfortable with.

A porsche is a great car, but of no use if you can't drive it

UNIX sounds better, DDR is better than SD RAM (its the double)
so pretty much you are getting double the computer with UNIX than you are with the Pentium 4.
Also UNIX is better for more dynamic sites like ahmed mentioned, i would look into who has best price for its quality. Try and look to see if its worth getting the UNIX or the Pentium 4.

php / perl are, at present i hasten to add, alot more widely used than asp.

unix is universally more stable than windows, it is also much harder to break down, and there are very few virus' that will attack a unix system (mainly as all the virus' are written by miffed-off unix programmers).

the DDR RAM is a good bonus, the systems sound good. SCSI drives are a must, as well as huge processing power. the specs are very dependant upon what you are going to use it for, and what connection it is going to have to the net. are you looking to start a commercial hosting company? or just play around hosting yourself?

If you'll use it in rack mounth chassis, I suggest to go to P III instead.

P4 has been reported to have a poor performance in rackmounth chassis due the heat.

Originally posted by DaveTodd
php / perl are, at present i hasten to add, alot more widely used than asp.

Hi DaveTodd,

While I do agree with your other point about Windows not being secure, I would like to point out that comparing PHP and Perl with ASP. It wouldn't exactly be fair to put both PHP and Perl on one side against ASP alone. If you compare ASP with Perl, you'll find that ASP is far more popular. PHP is only slightly more popular than ASP. (These results were taken from a Google search.) I think that VipResources should pick a server that matches the scripting language with which he is most familiar.

conker ... i would disregard the .PHP versions .ASP comparison

Many sites use a PHP backend to generate static pages.

For eg, sitePoint does that, and so do I [at webmasterstop.com]

So even though PHP is being used to drive the site, the end user has no clue about that

Overall, PHP is a lot more popular [and growing way faster] unless you go into the corporate/enterprise area, where the use of one platform becomes much more important.

Lastly, the actual server specs dont matter THAT much.

I would take a RAQ4 with 5 light users over a quad xeno 4 config with 2000 heavy users.

In the end, the hosting company will likely keep the same amount of 'load' on either, so ur choice of OS becomes more important then.

one question...is VIPresources getting all this?