Mac Server Advice

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Hi All,

As a complimentary service for our marketing clients, my company offers web and email hosting. We've been a HostGator reseller for some time now and have had few problems, except with one client that's particularly high maintenance. Anyway, long story short, we're looking to dedicated solutions, and I'd dearly love to make it an Apple server.

However, I know Apple discontinued the XServe, and it seems most of the Apple deployments these days are co-located Mac Minis. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the idea of putting my clients' production sites on a Mac Mini though.

I'll grant that the load is relatively low (fewer than 500K pageviews per month - and only about 100 mailboxes total), but can a Mini really handle it? And what about overheating in that tiny box? And what about disk mirroring, etc?

Does anybody have experience with this who can offer some advice?

Thanks!

Z
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
THe mini can handle most loads, we use a mini as a database server with no problems

Saying that, any mac can be a dedicated server, but your real problem is the reliability of your connection. If your company has its own rock solid connection then its fine, but if you get occasional drops in connection then that will also drop all of your hosted accounts

It's up to you, a dedicated service provider like 1&1 might be better and will save you all the hassle of configuring your own server to host multiple domains
 
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Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 Xeon 6gb DDR2 1TB OSX Server
A few things to consider would be some form of redundancy and DR. Mac minis lack the expandability and redundancy capabilities. I would look more into a Mac Pro, they can hold up to 4 HDD (disk mirroring, stripping, stripping + parity). But like louishen it may be best to let a dedicated provider help you out.
 
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Shikarnov
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Hi,

Thanks for the responses. I always intended to co-locate the server, but those that I found don't have the space for a Mac Pro. They offer solutions for Mac Minis, or for something else that will fit in a rack space.

I agree with your points about expansion and redundancy - both of which are important to me.

Does anybody know of any dedicated providers that offer Mac servers? All the ones I know of seem to offer either Linux or Windows.
 
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Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
No dedicated offers mac boxes. Linux is a better bet as it uses the same Apache web server that OSX uses. The OS on the box is not really that relevant since you will be configuring a remote server through a web based control panel
 

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