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Howdy do, It very much depends on A) the kit - buy well from someone like HP or Dell, servers or blades, rack mounted gear is actually designed to handle long continual running better than desktops. B) cluster where possible, better having a cluster of good enough machi|nes with failover than one over spec'd beast that can still blow a fuse C) let the thing run, turning on and off shortens the life. Similarly, try not to reboot more than absolutely necessary. I've had a Solaris MySQL box run for 6 years - 3 past its warranty with only a couple of reboots. Trick with Solaris was to avoid the patches, great way of killing a box D) get proper support kit, condtioned UPS, air conditioned rack or room. E) Plan for growth, 5 years in the web is a lot of history and radical changes, double the memory - usually kind of time-honoured SAD rules of thumb Our web presence ran on a small fleet of 6 clustered machines, development envirnoment pushing stuff over via rsync to 5 live boxes. Whilst the odd bit of kit wobbled, no major probs with the mechanisms + the clustering meant 5 9's uptime even when we were hit with a DDOS. Otherwise, try hosting on the cloud or an excellent academic agent like the ULCC, with whom we now host our Moodle and Equella solutions shorlty to be employed Best Steve Nisbet Learning Resources Manager, LRT, MMU -------------------------------------------- "Before acting on this email or opening any attachments you should read the Manchester Metropolitan University's email disclaimer available on its website http://www.mmu.ac.uk/emaildisclaimer" --------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: Ben Whitehouse <[log in to unmask]> To: Ben Whitehouse <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 27/10/2010 17:06:39 Subject: Typical working life of a web server What do people think is the typical working life of a web server? I know it depends on a number of factors but do you have a 'rule of thumb' figure for your resources planning? Is 5 years pushing it?