Purchasing Server computer

[shijith]

Hi all
We are running our website with a private agency and we want to run the same by ourselves by owning a server computer. The site is with multiple applications such as digital research repository of theses and dissertation, e-book and CD-ROM databases etc. It is likely to be expanded with a few more functionalities/applications such as e-journal and e-publishing system. Of these, some of the applications will be running on Linux-Ubuntu platform and others on Windows. The databases used are : MySQL /PostgreSQL. The site can expect around 400 concurrent users from across the globe. Current database capacity is 10 GB and there will be incremental growth in future. Kindly advice a suitable solution for hosting the system and the cost involved.
Sincerely
Shijith

[camerongray]

You first of all need to think as to whether you really should be purchasing a physical server or not.  When you buy a physical server you are then having to take on the responsibility of managing the hardware and network to support it.  You also have to think about where you can put the server as you will need a very fast internet connection as well as reliable power.

In most situations nowadays you are better off to rent a virtual machine or use a cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services, with this you pay by the hour for the servers so you can easily experiment with different configurations to figure out what works best for your application or even dynamically scale the servers you are using based on current demand.