This site is currently being run off of a (slow) dedicated server.

A Pentium III 450 Mhz machine with 128 mb of ram. It has been for all of ONE DAY. I thought this would be enough for only these forums, but apparently not. All 128 megs of ram are used up in addition to another ~90-150 megs of swap. The cpu mainly runs at 3% usage with frequent short spikes up to 25% and more. (I noticed it even go to as much as 80% usage for very very brief periods of time!!)

Obviously this site is busting at the seams trying to use this server - which has only been up for a day. Therefore, an upgrade is definitely in order. Here are three setups I'm looking at. Which do you think would be better suited to run this site alone, which mainly interacts with MySQL and php.

Pentium 4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of SDRAM
Celeron 1.8 ghz with 1024 mb of SDRAM
Celeron 2.0 ghz with 256 mb DDR RAM

All three solutions come equipped with a 40 gigabyte IDE drive with ~1000 gb bandwidth/month. In addition, they're all similar in price (give or take a very few dollars/month).

Of these three, which would be the best solution (in your opinion) for a database driven site? As far as I know, ram and ram speed are most important over processor speed. Please don't suggest a machine with specs higher than any of these three, because it is most likely above my price range. In addition, I am looking for a long-term solution that I can grow into (if possible). Just as long as it isn't something that daniweb.com will outgrow in the next few months, growing at the rate we are.

I thought it was running slow
I wont suggest anything maybe jjorgensen626 will get in here 2 morrow and give some good advice gal.

Those options almost seem overkill for an apache webserver, for IIS these options are OK. But Linux should not need too much more than what you currently have (well a little more memory wont hurt 128+512=640). Do you have access to a chart/graph of the resources your site demands? Also, and sorry for the many times I have asked this, but what is the connection speed (wan connection). If you are using the same hosting company than no need for this info, but if it is a different company, please provide this information.

If I have to choose:

Apache = Pentium 4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of SDRAM

IIS = Celeron 1.8 ghz with 1024 mb of SDRAM

btw- I have a web server w/ T-1 connection, P4 2.4 1536Mb DDR 2700 tons of storage, IIS on W2K3. although it is not dedicated, all sites currently are static sites. This webserver is at an internet cafe I run in CA. If this sounds like useful information cscgal, let me know.

Overkill? Most vBulletin-powered websites run off of dual Xeon processors with 1-2 gigs of RAM and SCSI drives - and this is dedicated to the forums alone! Unfortunately I can't afford this as I make very little money (if any) off of this site.

After doing a bit of research at vbulletin.com (and asking this same question) I got a reply saying that
a Celeron 2 ghz with 1024 mb RAM, a 7200 RPM drive for files, and a second 10000 RPM drive dedicated to MySQL, should be able to handle about 300 concurrent users. That is a lil more than twice the traffic we have right now, which doesn't exactly leave a lot of room for future expansion.

The connection is irrelevant. It's more than enough and I'm with the same hosting company I've always used.

So what did you decide, or have you? I didnt think Apache needed that much Horse Power for what your using it for, but hey, Im not a linux guy. The Linux admin at my workplace didnt think you needed that much either. In either case, I guess it comes down to the bang for the buck $$$$$. So my chioce:

Celeron 1.8 ghz with 1024 mb of SDRAM

I chose a package for a Celeron 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of ram for $80/month. I'm also going to pay an extra $20-25/month for as much added ram as I can get. If I could get another 512 for that much, then great . Otherwise, even an extra 128 or 256 would be helpful. Just long as it doesn't run me far over $100/month.

I stay away from the celerons.I used to have a 1.8 I guess in your choices
{Pentium 4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of SDRAM}
{Celeron 1.8 ghz with 1024 mb of SDRAM}
you were torn between RAM? (Pentium =twice the power as the celeron)were all those choices the same cost per month.Heck I dont really think it makes a differnce though they are not that far apart in difference

I guess we agree. Thats cool, and not a bad price. Just curious, but do you know the connection speed the hosting company is using. I would like to look into doing some hosting ventures (depending on the $$) but if their using anything in the range of OC-12 then I guess I'll stick to the smaller hosting options that I'm already offering.

I was torn between the RAM, but like I stated eairler, I didn't think CPU was a big deal (going from 450Mhz to 1.8 Ghz) so I opted with the RAM

http://www.cihost.com/cheap_web_hosting/

I was torn between the Unix Dedicated Celeron plan and the Unix Dedicated P4 plan. As you could see, a celeron with more ram would still be cheaper than a P4 of the same clockspeed, with a lot less ram.

To serve daniweb, cpu power isn't even close to as important as ram is. With more ram, I can cache more of the database. Which means that pulling up any info from the database (viewing posts, threads, etc) will just be reading from ram without even touching the hdd (the main bottleneck of the system). The hard drive will only need to be touched when posts are written to it.

For this reason, ram is most important on a server dedicated to a site such as this one. While I still would have liked to go with a P4, ram is just more important.

The P4 has more cache RAM. I think that counts, due to the threading nature of what you are running (slight pun intended). The more it can hit local memory, the quicker it can talk to the world. All three are pretty close, though, and would work OK.