[ale] Collocating non-rackable boxen

[John Wells]

Guys,

For years, I've run a web server and email server out of my home over a
DSL connection from a mid-tower (Athlon 900mhz, 512MB).  I've been happy
with th experience and it has been enough to fulfill my needs and handle
web sites for a few of my friends' companies as well.

My only problem with this set up is power failures...everything about it
has been very stable, but a power failure when I'm out of town quickly
reveals its fragile nature.

So, in the last two weeks, I've transitioned over to a virtual private
server.  It's on a big AMD 64 bit machine and has a guaranteed amount of
256 MB ram (with gigabytes worth of burstable ram), which sounds ok, but
I'm starting to think it might be a little oversold.  It's slow at times,
certain webapps (web mail like squirrelmail for example, which open a LOT
of imapd connections) slow it quite a bit, and it's memory capabilities
are suspect.  For example, with ab, I can crash Apache using 300
concurrent connections for just 600 total attempts.  My old Athlon happily
chugs along with three times this amount.  I've yet to crash it.

So, I'm not so happy.  Ideally, I want my old server back but on a more
reliable power supply.

Is there a company out there that does affordable collocation of
non-racked PCs?  I can't spend a lot (the VPS is $45/month), but would
love to drop this guy somewhere with a reliable power supply and adequate
pipe.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!
John