Well, we have one–just one, actually, but it’s a pretty good one.

Here is the configuration:

• 1 Unit (Dual processors capable)
• Intel Quad core E5345 (Single processor)
• 16GB RAM (DDR2-667 Fully Buffered RAM)
• 1.5 TB SATA in Raid 5 (corresponding to 3 x 750GB).
• We have an auxiliary 160GB disk as floating drive.

Price: Between $5k and $7K depending on how you build it.

We evaluated big brand names and smaller brands, such as Penguin Computing. After careful evaluation, we decided to go with Penguin Computing. We are definitely happy with our choice. Penguin Computing has great experience with Linux, and their units are extremely well-designed and truly open and extensible.

Here is our “serv01.sportner.com” server (when it was in my garage):

As far as OS, we are have decided to take a risk and go with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 and SQL Server 2008 CTP… no, just kidding…

We are using CentOS 5, which is an amazing OS (thanks to RedHat and the CentOS org), with Xen. Today, we just have a Dom0 and one DomU for the blog and the service. The first additional domU will probably be dedicated to mail serving (mail for the service itself; we are using Google Apps for our internal email system).

Tips: Always double-check the price of your complete server. Do not look at the discount numbers. Big brands will always start very low and climb very, very fast. Also, some brands tend to have little “locks” in their servers. For example, some servers have proprietary drive bays which force you to buy all your drives from them. We also have a smaller development and back-office server, with a similar software configuration, but much smaller RAM and Disk. Penguin Servers are truly open, and come with all the bays regardless of the number of disks you originally purchase. If you want more information about Penguin Servers, feel free to contact Tom Tran.

From Christophe Coenraets‘ brain. It is pretty amazing, when you think that we had been looking for a name for more than a month without success. All imaginable names were already taken; more frustrating, most of them were only being used as “parking pages.”

We were almost in the process of buying a name for over $5,000 in desperation.

Then one day, we got an IM from Christophe saying “Did you find a good name?”, “I found a name for you”, “It’s available”, “sportner.com”, “sport + partner = sportner”, …

Although Christophe gently recommended that we buy the name immediately (for $8.99) and think about it later, we, for some complex reasons relating to neuron interference, decided to wait a day or two. Not surprisingly, a day later, the name was gone. However, surprisingly, couple of days later the name was available again. We took it for $8.99 and sent a big THANK YOU email and IM to Christophe. Everybody likes the name so far (which is pretty rare).

Off the record, we are convinced it was meant to happen. There are no other explanations to Chistophe’s sudden IM, or to the very mysterious name’s resurrection.

Tips: We would like to say that www.godaddy.com has good customer service and a really great price. We used to use other more expensive services (~$30 for a domain name), because we had the feeling that by paying more we would get better support. We were wrong. Godaddy.com is cheap at $8.90 per domain name, and its technical support is top notch.