General dedicated server question
 

Hey guys, I have this question about servers: let's say I have 1000 hosting sub-accounts (not domains, but sub-accounts, as in 1000 different people). I want to provide them with something cheap, reliable, with some sort of control panel, nothing too fancy needed. How many servers would I need keeping in mind those 1000 accounts may have 5-10k visitors a day all accounts combined (so barely some traffic)? Is it better to have more servers with less power or less servers but more powerful?

I think less servers/more powerful from an administrative and load balancing point of view. With so many clients it would be nice if there was some load balancing on the front end to a few geographically diverse servers.

The visitors won't be the issue, it'll be the actual content of the sites that'll determine whether or not you need more servers with less power, or less servers with more power.

1000 sites, if it's just a plain site for each (mostly text), no MySQL usage, no video streaming, can get away with a Dual Xeon server with as much ram as you can afford.

If the content is heavy, and requires a ton of server processing to deliver, then you're better off with 2-4 servers.

It all depends on the actual server processing needed to deliver the content to properly answer the question.

well, I don't plan to do anything fancy, this might be for sites getting 1 to 10 visitors a day and people who barely knows to turn on a computer. Plus, no profit intended, I just want it to be a good experience for everybody, but if a server goes down for a couple hours it's not the end of the world, probably nobody will notice it :Oh crap

didn't see your answer, more or less what I was thinking, maybe keeping blocks of 250-300 accounts per server for a start and then see how it works and adjust on the go, I just didn't know if there's a strict limit for accounts per box :)

As mentioned before, with that level of traffic disk space is the only issue. Any CPU, RAM, and network would be fine. You will need to new sure that things like log rotation are fully automated correctly. Also figure that if you get 1000 clients, probably at least one will send spam, one will put a gallery on their getting hammered from the hun, etc. You can target mom and pop shops and other little dink sites, but with a thousand of them some will cause problems.

ha ha, no worries, this is not for adult and I'm pretty sure this people has no fucking idea what spam is. And even then, I doubt they may have anyone to send spam to or anything to sell :)

Be careful with php though, as soon as people start using their own php scripts the memory and processor usage of your server can get huge, and even make your server cras if you haven't configured things right. Uploading/downloading html, pics and videos doesn't put much stress on modern servers with at least 4GB RAM and quad core processors.