how easy is OS X Server / Xserve to manage?

[wnowak1]

I have no troubles with my Xserves. When looking at hosting a website, your talking Apache, which is very nice to work with.

I've deployed many OS X Servers, some on Xserve hardware, some on desktop hardware, as well as a few Xserve RAIDs. I haven't had one of them fail. I run my own site, www.district13computing.com, on Mac OS X Server and haven't had a moment of downtime and its running web and email for me, as well as a few other services.

What are their specific pains in this move? The biggest 'issue' that gets brought up is the lack of a secondary power supply in the Xserve units. Of course, that can be properly overcome by using two Xserves by leveraging failoverd, heartbeatd and, in 10.4, launchd. This will give you redundancy on every component in your server. In some cases, the cost of the second Xserve is not much more than proper parts kits.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, though I may hit you up for some cool pzizz stuff!

Hi. I noticed your chicago based. Do you colocate your server? If so, can you share who you colocate with ? I'm looking for colo in chicago myself and having a hard time finding good service / price ratio ;-)

 

[Go3iverson]

I had the same issue and couldn't find one that charged a reasonable rate, so I brought my server in house...literally!

If you shop around, you can find many companies that will offer you compelling pricing and bandwidth, with static IPs, for a small business, which could be a second bedroom, or anywhere in the home. This isn't the greatest method known to man, but it works. I can give you some provider info if you like, but dslreports.com is a great place to start.

Obviously, this is only meant for smaller use. If your planning on running e-commerce and demand 24x7x365 uptime, this may not be for you, but most companies will give you uptime guarantees, for the right price. Personally, I had zero downtime until this past weekend, when something went wrong with my ISP in general (still fighting through that a bit).

Of course, offsite will give you things like UPS protection and rack space as well, which'll cost you extra at home, though I'm using a PowerMac to host my online services, so that was my 'go-around' for the racking issue.