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This is a re-make of this interesting question. I've rephrased it slightly to avoid pulling aggro and to provide some quality information, as I've pondered this before, but only JUST ran the numbers..

I am setting up a personal website to help me learn (PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc)

I have the following machine laying around:

  • Pentium 4 HT @ 3.0GHz
  • 1GB of Memory
  • Plenty of Storage
  • A freshly registered domain for this project

My question is, for modern web technologies, is this machine sufficiently powerful? I want to keep my costs very minimal, so I'd rather use the hardware I have than rent a server or something.

Community
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James T Snell
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3 Answers3

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is this machine sufficiently powerful?

Yup, that will run it. But I don't think it's in your best interest, financially.

In this case, the "correct" answer "is" the free tier of Amazon's EC2. (or a similar service). It's pretty extremely awesome. If you pay for a 3yr term on a Micro Instance (that's $82), you'll likely save a fair bit of money:

Here's a little "proof" for you:

Assumptions:
 - Your P4 eats 200W while idle (a decent guess for a 3GHz machine)
 - You pay 0.07 $/kWhr
 - You'll leave your P4 on 24/7

200W = 0.2kW

3 yrs = 3 * 365 days/yr * 24 hrs/day = 26280 hours

Thus you'll need 0.2kW * 26280 hrs = 5256.0kWhrs

Which @ 0.07 $/kWhr will cost 0.07 $/kWhr * 5256kWhrs = 367.92 $

So, running your P4 will cost you a lot more. The numbers may be out a bit, but your P4 costs you an order of magnitude more, that's not small. If you're skeptical, still, go grab one of these to see how much power you're really dumping in to that old space-heater.

I've found that I get pretty far on the AWS EC2 free tier, so it may not even cost you anything, for what you're talking about. I'm running a production server on EC2 right now,

I run various things on Amazon micro instances, the 613MB of memory is plenty for web services. A good tip to know is that if you're running a machine with <4GB of RAM, then use 32 bit OSes - because running 64bit apps requires more memory for the same program, so unless you actually are using >4GB of memory, it doesn't matter.

James T Snell
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This will be more than powerful enough to run you test/development environment; however, it will be MUCH cheaper for you to rent some web hosting from a company. (Just in terms of power used by this machine per month).

Nate
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Yes you can run linux and a web server on even less.

Don't forget though that your own PC is good enough to act as a web server and learn on. I assume you have a windows PC? Install the WAMP server which comes with Apache, mysql & php already configured up. It's the quickest way to get up and running on the local machine IMHO.

http://www.wampserver.com/en/

hookenz
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