[bedoughty]

I work for a Student Life department of a colorado university. I need to redesign our site, and I'm considering hosting it ourselves. We have a dual 2.0 G5 powermac (1 GB ram) that I don't do much more than graphic design work on. (Running Tiger) Ideally, the site would be some kind of a CMS system, like Mambo or maybe just a blogging system like MovableType or Wordpress. I am the admin of this machine so I can install anything I need to accomplish this; software and whatnot is not what I'm concerned about.

What I'm wondering is: do y'all think this machine could handle it, while I'm doing daily office stuff, and assuming that we have the typical bandwidth available to your typical public university student life office. If a speed test helps, here is the latest test I did at dslreports.com. Yea, it's weird that my down and up are so mismatched. Something I should talk to our IT about.

Please let me know your thoughts and any other information you might need to make a decent assessment. I'll probably start playing around with this later on this week.

[larkost]

It is generally a bad idea to host a web site on a computer that is being used as a desktop machine. You probably don't need much processor power to host your website (I would guess you don't get many hits), so just get a cheap box like a mini and be done with it.

[bedoughty]

Ooh Larkost, there's another angle.. we're planning on getting a fair amount of traffic as our site is the hub for events, student health insurance, notebook lease programs and a few other random things. But how 'bout this: do you think a Mac mini could handle the job if I did what you recommended and just left it dedicated to the task?

[larkost]

Simple answer: yes.

[mitchell_pgh]

Can't they host it on a university server? IMHO, a Mac is wasted as a web server. Considering you can get a solid host for $25/month with full backup, plus every extra under the sun.

Some univ. require them to be local.