I have been running a webserver for some time now to suppliment my hosted sites, and hold sites under construction, etc. It also serves as file storage and ssh server for my personal junk. I am going to upgradesoon to host much of a site for my extended family to load and view pictures, news, etc. So traffic, which is almost none now, may increase a little. I also have been experimenting with a program called Surgemail and want to use it for remote http mail and archive mail storage. I am currently running RH 9 on a 550Mhz machine. It works flawlessly. I will be upgrading to Fedora Core. I have the option to upgrade to a 850Mhz machine but would like to continue using the same 550Mhz machine. My questions are as follows:

(1) Should I use seperate servers for the new use of Surgemail and semi public ssh file uploads? Will be running Apache, SSH, Surgemail,

(2) And if not, will there be much notice of access speed with the 850 Mhz processor?

(3) Would there be any gain by using serperate nic's in one machine, meaning a reduction in cpu and memory overhead,?

Hope someone out has worked through similar configurations and could counsel me before I migrate to the new s

In general, two is allways better then one. I would build a cluster with fail over and if possible with loadbalancing. A slow fallback is better then nothing.

Which type of Cluster depends on your demands.

The difference of 550 to 850 Mhz in this case is smal, thus web and email depends on the speed of your network and harddisks. More RAM might be more effective.

Hth
Fluppi

Thanks fluppi

Your take on the matter confirms my first idea's. I have such little traffic now that I think one machine will support the needs for now. My upload bandwidth is small, and therefore I think that network is probably the bottleneck. I have little experience with load balancing or a load balancing server, but I will probably play around with it soon as a result of your suggestion. It's time to learn. Am I correct to assume that if I do set up a cluster in the future that the data and services on the server will not be useless but incorporated into the future cluster? Well, thanks for your time and advice. jeff