First of all,you could have bought /rented a cheap VPS from the net
I have recently moved my 6 websites(atlantia.online,democratie-virtuala.com,ihl-data.com,e-world.site,democratie-atlanta.org and virtual-democracy.org) from 123systems.net to contabo.com where I have rented a 4 core/20 GB Ram,400 GB SSD server…called Zalmoxe with Cpanel

yes,the cpanel extensions are like 116 dollars per month and the server itself is another 35 dollars per month but hits very far from your 7000-8000 dollars spent on your build which is far wrost than mine

You dont feel comfortable with linux?with a simple apt-get install or yum or pkg or zypper…you can have everything and Linux is like 8 times faster than Windows server (which I have also tried at vultr.com)
Read the messages from the system and you are good to go

Secondly…one cheap 500 W source?let me tell you,if you run your server for like one week..your power source will be gone with your video card and your motherboard
not much to lose though…4670?really?
I remember when I cursed all those VPSes for having bad graphics but my 5670 runs circles around it

Thirdly I see now that you are recommending SSDs but you are using HDDS for storing your forums:))))
so I guess their reliability is not so great
Fourth:the site is really slow on me..you have perhaps bad sectors on your Toshiba raid array..use a Raid 10 next time

Fifth:your server is gone,you are using Amazon VPSes right now…you have inexistent pages…visit my websites:)))
Apollo

1 Not his fault your broke… 2 Onboard Raid Sucks its “Fake Raid”.

3 raid 1 really? why not raid 4, 5 or 6?

4

I believe overall Linux will suit you better, but in terms of ease I prefer Windows. Support I find is better for Linux. Keep in mind WS 2012 is new, but if WHS 2011 is anything to go by, solutions are most often offered by forums as you said. Tech support, especially on the MS side, is awful to put it nicely.

I can also add that WS 2012, while a lot more polished, is just not as well documented. If you run into a problem, chances are you’re on your own.

If you are comfortable, definitely use Linux. Just remember what you want out of your server. WS 2012 has everything I want, so I went with it. Give Amahi a try and see if you like it. If not, go with WS 2012, or WHS 2011 if you’re worried about cost.

WHS 2011 is EoL but support will last for about 4-5 years. Just remember it has no Storage Pooling feature.

Hey Brian,

The reason I said that is because the array was used as the main OS drive, and unfortunately WS 2012 doesn’t allow backups on the main drive. At least in my case, it gave me errors whenever I tried setting it, and would always try and look for other drives to backup to.

Aside from that though, if you do have extra hard drives, definitely setup a backup. I made it optional, as WS 2012 has some weird backup options. I had to move my backup folder to a separate drive from the array to actually get the backup process working.

Hey Felix,

Great question. I actually ran four simultaneous copy tests from two different sources to the server, including a 600GB live backup session. Overall speed was pretty darn nice, about 35+ MB/s for each copy session, of course varying due to sizes. A 550GB folder of 2.5k files and 141 folders took about 4 hours to copy over, while the other four copies were going on.

We’re waiting on CacheCade at the moment to post proper benchmark results. We got about 650MB read, but only about 60MB write for random IO testing using CDM, so we’ll see how much CacheCade boost performance.

The LAN side of it is doing much better, and those numbers will rise once we activate CacheCade. My LAN network is entirely on gigabit speeds, and there were absolutely no hiccups while all of this was going on. It was absolutely seamless.