At 09:52 PM 6/6/2002 +0200, Peter Kiil wrote:
I'm very close to buying my first Cobalt server. I'm starting a small hosting business with 2 of my friends and we decided to buy a RaQ since it seems to cover our needs pretty well. We decided on the RaQ4, but a few days later the RaQ550 was announced. After comparing specs and price we decided to buy a RaQ550. So here's my simple question: Are we paying to be Crash Test Dummies or is the RaQ550 ok even though it's a pretty new product? Anyone tested it yet? Anyone words of advice? No price comments please. I know we can get a Linuxbox cheaper but that's not what we want.
Don't do it. I'm not sure that I regret buying our raq's since we got quite a bit of use out of them before Sun bought the company and ruined it, but we sure won't be buying any more. Without the excellent support that we used to get from Cobalt, the raq's are becoming progressively less useful. We're putting new sites on Plesk and migrating existing clients whenever a reasonable excuse comes up.
If you don't know how to run unix, either hire someone who does, or give up the idea of running servers. Stuff like Cobalt/Plesk is great for giving the client a gui to make minor changes himself, but the server administrator must understand the underlying infrastructure. If there's nobody in the company that can run the server, you'll be screwed when it breaks.