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This Server
Technical summary of what's serving you these pages
Hardware
Since October, 2006 this server was an iMac G3 (Snow - Summer 2001 - 500 MHz Power PC w/ 512 meg of RAM) running Ubuntu 6.06.
In February, 2009 it was upgraded to an IBM ThinkCentre (2.6 GHz Pentium 4 w/ 512 meg of RAM). The upgrade was mostly because support for the Power PC was fading and I want to start playing with Grails. The iMac cost $90 shipped from eBay and the IBM was $149 with free shipping from NewEgg (who I've always had good luck with).
In February, 2010 the ThinkCentre recieved a brain transplant and is now running an AMD Athalon Dual Core 2.9 GHz with 8 Gb of RAM. I felt I needed more juice to run some Java with Hibernate code I was developing. It turns out I could have made do if I hadn't made an amature Hibernate mapping mistake, but the extra RAM does make a big difference anyway and I can't return the heatsink since I had to do some metal work to make it fit!
Software
Network
This server is on a cable home network with 1MB/s up link and 40KB/s down. DNS is provided by DynDNS. I'm running Tomato firmware on my router to handle dynamic dns, port forwarding, and do some logging.
Why?
I get a kick out of having a fairly modern* and capable web server running for very small dollars. Things that would have been hard and expensive a short while ago are getting cheap and easy at an astounding rate.
Also, database development on anemic hardware really shows you where your queries could use some optimization. I've learned a lot about SQL that I might not have thought to look into if the hardware were beefy. It's just like running with ankle weights - but in a nerdy way!
(* as far as the software goes ;-)
