Hi guys,

Sorry to make my first post so elaborate, I hope to provide help to others soon... :lol:

I'm looking at co-locating a web server, the purpose of which will be to host as many small scale websites as possible. Unfortunetely, I have very little knowledge of webserver hardware requirements - when I go shopping on the net, I find my self confronted with hardware which seems to be an overkill, I always assumed that a 2ghz with a gig of ram would be capable of running pretty much any web site(s)

By small-scale, each site will be getting a maximum of 20-30 hits a day. All the sites will be mysql/PHP based, kinda like a custom made content management system but with less of the complexity, mainly just to allow easy updating of content by end users. 1 mysql database per site. There will be server-side includes galore if I have my way :evil: ... Would be running Apache on a Linux platform.

Basically, I'm looking for a rough estimate of how many of these sites I could run of a single 'average' specced webserver (2ghz, 1gig ram). Also is there a limit to the number of virtual hosts Apache can run, and does each of these incur a significant overhead?

I know I'm kinda asking 'how long is a piece of string' but any expierence you guys have of the sort of load a low end webserver can handle would be appreciated. I also don't have much understanding of the kind of load that php/database sites put on a system, do PHP includes and mysql quiries kill resources? =

Many thanks in advance for your help

I would think a machine of that caliber could handle anywhere from 1-25 apache setups depending on the size of what is being accessed.