A healthy recipe
First Communications had a smorgasbord in mind for its first Internet server: static and dynamic Web page serving, e-mail messaging, e-mail list-serve hosting, and, eventually, e-commerce.
Additionally, because First Comm had subsidiary businesses for which it wanted to serve sites, it needed "virtual" hosting. While virtual hosting is simple with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), you can't just add water and mix when you're working with Linux and the Apache Web server, especially for Linux newbies.
Because of its reputation as the de facto Linux leader and its strong technical-support options, the company picked the Red Hat 6.2 Linux distribution and easily installed the default configuration on its server. Before purchasing its server, however, First Comm had to make sure that the hardware was supported by Linux. While Linux's hardware support is quite broad, it's better to stick with name-brand hardware, especially if you go the white-box route. Going to build your own? Then it's best to choose motherboards from big names like Abit, Asus, Intel and Tyan; SCSI host adapters from Adaptec, Advansys and Buslogic; and network interface cards from Intel, SMC and 3Com.
First Communications also considered the possibility of going the Linux-based Internet appliance route, and briefly evaluated Cobalt's Qube 3 Professional, Rebel.com's NetWinder and Technauts' eServer.Net. All of those solutions are easy to set up and administer, but none of them had sophisticated virtual domain hosting capabilities.
If First Comm wanted that capability in an appliance, only Cobalt's higher-end RaQ4i would do. While an excellent ISP Web- and site-hosting productââ,¬"at more than US$4,000 for an entry-level hardware configurationââ,¬"the RaQ4i was out of First Comm's price range for its first Internet server. Besides, even the RaQ4i was also a little too locked down to load with add-on software, especially those subsystems that require kernel re compiles, like PHP and the mod_perl add-on for the Apache Web server software.
So it was that First Comm went ahead and bought a white-box Intel-based server, a generic Pentium III 600MHz system with 256MB of RAM and an 18GB SCSI hard disk, from its systems integrator. This configuration was more than enough to handle a decent-sized Web site as well as a healthy amount of e-mail.
