A couple hosting questions

[ErnieG]

For those of you experienced in hosting FM, I'd appreciate a little of your experience. I'm currently hosting for a single not-too-demanding client, on a Mac G4 with OS 10.1.5. I'd like to branch out a bit, but I'm wondering about "accepted practices."

1. SPEED. When I was still in IWP, I upgraded my ISP's upload speed from 128K to 512K (download in theory is 3MB), and it made quite a difference. Quite a jump in price, too! Now that I've graduated to CWP, I'm wondering if I really need to pay for that 512K. Someone has said 128 should be fine. Each view in the database has a thumbnail, stored as URLs, and the JPEGs don't get much bigger than 16 or 20K. If I go back to 256K or 512K, will clients notice the difference?

2. Do you all set up RAIDs? Is that just a given, or can you get by with fingers crossed? I also wonder because when you copy open FM files, the copies give you "checking block consistency" notices when opened.

3. OS X version. I tend to be conservative about upgrading, but am wondering if anyone has experienced problems with 10.1.5 that are solved in 10.2.x

4. Is anyone still having trouble with bugs in FM Unlimited 6, or have they been taken care of?

As always, I'm grateful for this "community" that stretches around the world.

Ernie

[Steve T.]

Hi, E! We don't host for anyone, but here's our info for our own uses...

1. SPEED. Sorry, I can't relate... I work at a University and have 5-7 megabit up/down.

2. RAID. All our db's are low web traffic so we don't need the speed of a RAID (we have a software raid doing disk-mirroring on 2 internals for a non-published system, but that's it).

3. OS X. We run 10.2.6 and FMP-u 5.5 on a beige 300MHz G3 desktop and are VERY HAPPY with stability. It ran for months without problem, then unexpectedly quit 2 or 3 times in 1 week, and then ran for months again with no restarts or crashes. We still keep an eye on it but it's been behaving itself lately.

4. FMP-u 6.0. We get an educational discount similar to an upgrade price so we just leapfrog (FMP 2.1 to FMP4.0 to FMP 5.5... we''l probably wait for FMP 7.0)

--ST