Re: 2 questions

"Adrian Teasdale" <adrian@inovica.com> wrote: > I have been speaking to a company that I am looking at getting a dedicated > server from. They ONLY do one IP address per server and use name-based > hosting. I have asked for dedicated IP's, but their answer has been that > all hosting companies are going to have to go to name-based hosting now. > What is everyone's feeling on this? Years ago, the company I was with used > name-based and I remember that the search engines did not like this Search engines handle name-based sites just fine now. Very old browsers (I don't recall what generation) are not able to access name-based sites, but that's probably not justification for needing individual IPs for each site. If you plan on hosting many sites and need anonymous FTP or SSL for these sites you'll need more IP addresses. IP addresses can be hard to come by for some hosting companies so if you actually need them you should shop around or explain your situation to the hosting company you're talking to. There are *tons* of web hosting companies that will lease or colocate a RaQ4 for a reasonable price with more than 1 IP. > On to hosting, the above server is a Cobalt Raq 4i. Does anyone else on the > list use one of these and what do you think? I want to make sure that it's > easy enough to compile latest php and mysql whenever I want to Until about six months ago when I joined another business I did a lot of business as an independent Cobalt consultant. You shouldn't have any problem installing PHP and MySQL with whatever configuration options you want. In fact, I currently run several older generation RaQs that use the Mips architecture instead of the x86 architecture used by the RaQ4 and I've been installing development versions of PHP and MySQL as they were released every few weeks. You may want to visit www.cobalt.com and sign up for the cobalt-users mailing list and/or bookmark a mailing list archive of it like the one found at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/. As far as the RaQ4 itself goes, for less_than_expert Linux system administrators, the GUI makes certain functions very easy to do (add users, websites, control DNS), but if you're comfortable doing things from the commandline or you expect heavy CPU usage or you plan on installing a lot of programs and modifying the system or you need redundancy and failover it might not be the best server for you. With that said, it's a great server [appliance] for basic web and email hosting and less than enterprise level database usage. -- Steve Werby COO 24-7 Computer Services, LLC Tel: 804.817.2470 http://www.247computing.com/