Question about Linode 64 vs 96

On my linode 64 I run web and email with no problem. But that's probably only because it's just me and my immediate family that use it. it really depends on the load you're expecting.

I run Apache with PHP running a photo gallery and phpwiki. For mail I run exim, uw-imap and IMP as web mail (including calendar).

Thanks for the response….

Why have you chosen Exim over Sendmail or Postfix? And how does UW-IMAP perform? Thanks.

exim is mainly because that's what we use at work, so I can get support from there, plus I want to learn what we use there.

uw-imap is trivial to install and performs with no problems whatsoever. But keep in mind that the load on my server is minimal, so it's not really a good benchmark.

[off-topic] uw-imap? i've never used it but only read bad things… but hey, if it isn't broken, don't fix it [/off-topic]

the real question is what are you using the site & e-mail for? if it's a low traffic personal site with only a few e-mails, sure - use the 64. just don't expect fast response times under moderate loads.

but if you're going to be writing huge inefficient php pages which crunch mysql databases and regularly exchange e-mails with 1 meg attachments… go for the 96. memory can quickly become the bottleneck especially if the services you're running don't scale well.

I have a 96 with a bunch of low traffic services, and disk IO is definately the bottleneck. my swap is only lightly touched, but even that is enough to bring the system to a crawl if there's another IO intensive task running.