Hello from South Bend IN
 

I stumbled upon this site searching for colo providers near South Bend Indiana. I finally am putting my order in this weekend for a colo server I put together.

AMD Athlon 64 3800+
512MB Ram (upgrading to 1GB in 6mo to a year)
120GB EIDE drive (Purchased the drive way before purchased any mobo)
Running CentOS 4.4 i386

I have had a few websites for years but now that I am almost done with my college courses I have more time to dedicate to working on the sites. I can't wait.

I am interested in chatting with several people from around the South Bend area.

Hello!

Sounds like a pretty decent server you got there. I suggest way more ram though (2gb minimum), but 512 will work fine for low traffic (just be sure to give yourself a lot of swap room (swap = 2x ram).

Also about CentOS, it's crap*. I suggest using Debian Etch for your server as it has rock solid security and is one of the most stable distros around! At my last job we install CentOS on the clients' servers that didnt give a crap about the distro because it is simple and fast to install, but for the larger clients we always use either BSD or Debian for the stability.

*Note: This is a personal opinion. Not to be taken rudely.

Yes, If I can remember I made the swap at least 2GB in preparation for upgrading to 1GB. I will soon have a backup SATA drive in the machine instead of remote FTP the backups to my apartment on my slow DSL.

I would have loved to go with a Debian based distro. I prefer apt over yum and several other features of Redhat distros. However, there are no stable versions of cPanel that I am aware of that run on Debian.

Ah, well that puts a damper on things, now doesn't it? Have you tried any of the free alternatives (ZPanel, Plesk, Ensim, etc)?

I personally don't use any of these panel type things as I don't see the need. I give my clients ssh access, and for those that dont know what they are doing there is tech support to do the work for them.

CentOS isn't all that bad. I've been running CentOS on my server since March or April with a heavy load of site traffic all that time - no problems at all so far.

Debian is another distro that I've been wanting to get my hands dirty with for a while, especially with you all always speaking so highly of it.

DanielJay, your server uses DDR2 memory, right? HP currently has a $40 rebate on some 1gb DDR2 667 modules. You can get them at TechOnWeb for $16 after the rebate and can get max of 5 rebates. So, 5gb for $80 + shipping and tax if applicable. It's quite a good deal & I'm thinking about getting that just in case I need more RAM at some point. The rebate is with HP & the RAM has a 1 year warranty. TechOnWeb shows today as the last day to buy with the rebate, although the rebate form has July 31st listed. Anyhow, here's the link if you're interested: http://www.techonweb.com/products/pr...aspx?id=D30292