Dedicated Hardware

This page gives details of the hardware behind our Dedicated Server packages. Our dedicated servers are based on two different platforms, with our single-disk systems provided using Apple hardware, and our multi-disk RAID systems built by DNUK.

Single disk Intel-based servers

Our Intel-based servers are provided using Apple's Mac Mini (1.83GHz and 2GHz Core Duos) and AppleTV (1GHz Pentium M) systems. These might at first seem like a strange choice for server hardware, but with today's soaring data center power prices, energy consumption is key, and we've yet to find a package that beats these machines for efficiency without sacrificing performance.

We've been hosting on Minis since early 2005 and they've proven themselves to be an exceptionally reliable hosting platform. The Mini's little brother, the AppleTV, is even more frugal when it comes to energy use and allows us to provide you with a real, dedicated server at a price better than many virtual server packages.

Since Apple switched from PPC to Intel processors, Linux runs on these machines just like any other x86 hardware. Of course, being Apple hardware we can also offer these machines running Mac OS X too.

RAID Servers

For some applications, redundant storage is critical. You want to not only be able to survive a disk failure, but to recover from it and replace the failed disk all without downtime. That's where our AMD servers with hot-swap hardware RAID come in. Our servers feature 3ware SATA RAID cards, connected to a pair of 1TB disks, offering 1TB of storage in a high performance RAID 1 configuration.

People keep telling you RAM is cheap, so why do some dedicated server providers charge so much for RAM upgrades? Our RAID servers come with 8GB as standard. RAM is cheap, which is why we stock 8GB machines, and don't waste time and money upgrading.