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The Standard Edition supports upto 4 GB RAM and thats not enough for webservers in the long run having many Application Pools! You cant have that many customers on Standard servers and its possible to have many more customers on Enterprise servers because of the memory issue.

Many hosting companies prefer having many servers using the Standard edition, so when a server is down, its not too many customers that are affected. The minuses are that its more expensive and there is more work (more servers to upgrade).

What do you prefer and why? Lets discuss...

I don't really see the point to use Enterprise for webservers. I don't think it's really common to have more than 4GB RAM and more then 4 CPUs in a plain webserver. Maybe you can justify these beasts for SQL boxes, but that's another story.

I think that when you put more then 4CPUs/4GB RAM in one web server, your costs will rise significantly. Because you will probably want to put a lot of customers on that box, so this means investing in a really good disk subsystem too. Plus you will be paying licenses for each CPU in the box with Windows.

No I think 2CPUs, and 2 - 4GB RAM is more then sufficient for a common webserver. Especially since multicore CPUs are becoming more commonly used. This is more cost efficient as you will be paying licenses per physical CPU and not per core.

Plus, as you said, if you put less customers on a box, less customers will be affected when it's down.

The only way to justify the additional cost for Enterprise is in my opinion if you are going to setup a cluster.

And yes, I voted for standard

Basically it comes down to resouces.

 Can you afford it and is the cost worth it?

What machine(s) will you be installing it one?

Can those machines optimize it?

Every scenerio is different and to be treated differently, there are so many variables to consider.

Personally I use Standard, but I want to upgrade to Enterprise when I can cover the costs. 

I voted Standard but it really depends on your target customer.

If you are offering top notch services (like a separate app pool for each site) and charging accordingly, then by all means go for Enterprise. But I think it is very difficult to charge enough money from shared hosting clients to justify such a setup.

Although, I'm offering a high quality shared hosting service if my customer base wants something with more options (be it memory, CPU or special configuration) they can always get a dedicated server or cluster and do whatever they want with it.

Bottom line: think of your customers. If they want this service and can afford the rates you will need to charge to make it profitable then go for it.

My aim is to save space at my data center and to update as few servers as possible by having great hardware that can handle minimum 3-5 times more customers. 

Ingvald, so you say, go with SAS disks if you install Enterprise but again the costs will become even higher. And you are also talking about high-end hosting with Enterprise servers having a cluster setup but thats not my plan as I want to save server space at my data center.

Katatonic, it is for a webserver using DNP. The aim is to put as many customers as possible on one server - being aware of the minuses. The new DualCore Xeon servers are awesome! The SAS disks are amazing and with the mix of DDR2 RAM and 2x2MB CPU cache on RAID5 disks sounds very nice in my ears but its not cheap at all! But it should cover itself in the long run.

ACW, no - no pool for each customer. The plan isnt offering high-end hosting but rather having 1 server instead of 3-5 servers. Remember we also are paying a lot to data centers so it should not be that expensive in the long run!

And can any one remember how much Microsoft want for Enterprise servers?

As of last year Windows 2003 Ent. Edition cost about $25/CPU/month but it really depends on your situation. See http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default.mspx for more info.

How many customers are you looking to put on each server? If the sites share app pools then you can add many, many sites on a 4GB box (technically it depends on the kind of websites you host but you get the idea).

On a different note: Keep in mind that just because you double the hardware resources it doesn't mean that you can host double the sites. Also, if you increase the CPU and RAM without improving the storage, storage will likely become a bottleneck as the number of sites increase.

Personally I just don't like that business model. I would rather yield a lower profit per server knowing that when one fails only a small number of sites are affected.

Just my 2 cents!

We can currently put minimum 700 sites on one server running Win03 Standard, RAID 1, SATA disks, P4 Intel 3 GHz with 4 GB RAM. Its a mix of big and small sites and I think we can still put 300 more sites on this server.

Better disks, CPU etc. should allow us to put minimum 3000 sites on each server and I think the hardware can easily handle upto 5000 sites. The problem would be RAM if we use Standard server and thats why the Enterprise edition is coming up here. Ethernet, disk I/O and CPU should easily handle this amount. The plan is not one application pool but a few ones depending on what hosting plan they have chosen.

With quality hardware you will be able to have a much better uptime and the key is good disks (SAS disks with 10k or even 15k RPM).

Wow! I've never dreamed of putting 700 sites/server not to mention 3,000. We are definitely in different markets so take my vote for Standard as a right fit for my situation but maybe not yours.

I aim to keep the ratio from 75 to 150 sites/server with the average site going for about $20/month. This ratio may increase in the future but even if the server is idling I don't like the idea of going over 200; just because I don't like the idea of so many sites being down when something fails.

What is your average price/site? (not price/plan if you are offering reseller accounts)

This has turned out to be quite an interesting thread!

We operate in a foreign market having several servers using another cp but plan to change to DNP. We operate in the low end when coming to prices so thats why we optimize our servers for as many customers as possible per server.

What hardware do you use? And do you have web, mail, dns, stats and db servers on one machine (distributed or standalone servers)?

We plan to have distributed and dedicated servers meaning one machine for web, one for mail etc... We wont be able to run 3000 sites if we both run web and mail services on same machine.

We have a variety of servers, but all newly commissioned servers are at least Pentium® 4 Dell servers with 1 to 2GB of RAM. However, to ensure reliability, we aim to keep their resources at 50 to 60% regardless of the server configuration.

These servers are normally used as web servers and Microsoft SQL 2005 Express Edition for light database use. Other versions of SQL would usually be on dedicated servers. No email, stats or DNS on them.

I should also mention that we are small by design. This allows us to concentrate on providing quality services to a relatively small customer base.

Keep in mind that I'm not interested in adding more sites/server. For me it is not a matter of whether the server can handle it or not.

iCu:

My aim is to save space at my data center and to update as few servers as possible by having great hardware that can handle minimum 3-5 times more customers. 

If you want to save space and save on your licensing costs, I still think it's best to go for Standard. Because in a 1U server you can get up to 2 CPUs and 4 HDDs. Now unless you are gonna put more then 4GB of RAM in such a machine, Standard edition will be sufficient. This will cost you 40,00 EURO a month (Standard is about 20,00 EURO/month/CPU)

Now let's say you want to go for 4CPUs and 8GB RAM, you will probably need 4U space (dunno if this kind of servers is offered in 2U). Although this machine is double the specifications of the first one, it will need 4 times the space and about 107,00 EURO a month for licensing (Enterprise is about 27,00 EURO/month/CPU).

I am almost certain that if you take 2 servers of the first option it will be and more performant, and only taking half the space, and cheaper in licensing, and if one goes down only half of the websites are down.

Of course you could put more than 4GB of RAM in the first machine, which will obligate you to go for Enterprise. But I think you should really monitor the resources first to see what is the bottleneck (CPU, RAM or disk subsystem).

iCu:

Ingvald, so you say, go with SAS disks if you install Enterprise but again the costs will become even higher. And you are also talking about high-end hosting with Enterprise servers having a cluster setup but thats not my plan as I want to save server space at my data center.

SAS is just one of the options, but the more customers you put on the box the more performant your disks need to be. Of course clustering is not necessary, but it's one of the reason why you could choose for Enterprise as it's not available with Web and Standard.