Replacing a Personal Rack-Mounted Server?

Starky writes "Many moons ago, I cobbled together a 1U rack mount from parts which has since been diligently serving up my homepage and web sites for family and friends. It's a truly "Mom and Pop Shop" setup, running on a rack secluded in a closet at home over a DSL line. At the time, I was able to piggyback my order on a large order placed by a company for which I was working, allowing me to get a substantial discount. Now, the time has come to consider a replacement. However, I no longer work at a company that orders chassis and chips by the dozen. I would like to get a rack-mountable chassis, but don't know where to go as a lowly individual consumer looking for a box with minimal specifications (1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need) at a reasonable price. Any recommendation from Slashdotters who maintain their own rigs?"

Comments

Hey! Me too! Help me pick a CPU

[Just Some Guy]

I'm replacing a dying server, and for various reasons I'm getting a Dell, probably the PowerEdge 840. My questions:

• AMD or Intel? It seems like the ball's back in Intel's court these days, but I don't track hardware news so closely anymore.
• Pentium E2180 @2.0GHz (free), Core 2 Duo @2.2GHz ($50), or dual core Xeon at 1.86GHz ($100)? Cycles aren't everything, but I'm guessing that the Core 2 Duo at 18% higher clock speed ought to be the sweet spot.
• For RAM: 1GBx2 or 512MBx4? In some systems, more sticks == more interleaving == faster. In others, more sticks == more latency. What's the current thinking?
• Why doesn't Slashdot display bulleted lists correctly anymore?

To those who would tell me (and this story's poster) to Google it: I'd rather get today's recommendations from an interactive forum than try to find a website with the same information from the last year or so. Besides, what geek doesn't want to talk about hardware?