I need help about choosing the right dedicated hosting service, one which will suite my needs, and what equipment I will need. All I can tell you is that while most of the computers will be dells running Windows XP, I will be using PHP with MySQL to run off it (possibyl using macbook pro but most likely windows too) but it must also power 12 other Windows computers. I have no clue what equipment I need and where to get it.
Previously, I used a dedicated server using Linux platform running apps in Ruby on Rails and PHP with mysql database. I would log into the server on my macbook pro terminal and create databases and then set up apache and then get the app working live. But that was it. I knew nothing about the physical hardware or the server hosting- the only thing I knew was that it sat in my office and was on 24/7. It was a pretty sizeable machine at least bigger than your typical desktop computer.
Thanks for any response.
There are a lot of options out there in regards to dedicated servers and it can be quite confusing because of the amount of options available. Would managed be a part of the requirement, such an offering translates that the hosting provider is responsible for the 24x7 monitoring, maintenance and uptime of the system in addition some will even support the application and database itself.
If this is a mission critical application, managed might be the best option because not only will they manage it for you but they provide the hardware without cost and replacements since basically you are paying for the service and hardware specifications but not actually the hardware.
If owning your own hardware and going the co-location route (unmanaged) is in the better interest then I recommend pricing a system off of Dell, HP or IBM. Hardware specifics would probably be based on 1U or 2U size with 2 drives mirrored together and secondary storage for the content.