According to a quick calc I just did (keeping track of 4 accounts is not so easy) we are stopping now at approx. 2840 Euro.

Let's see what that money would buy us. A quick tour around various vendor's sites shows that we could spend that money on this IBM server.

It has a single Intel Xeon processor running at 2400 Mhz, upgradable to two CPUs. Adele, our current server, has dual Pentium 3 processors running at 500 Mhz, so this would most definitely fit our current needs, give us some headroom plus an optional upgrade path via the second processor.

The server comes with one 40 GB IDE harddisk. IDE disks should be ok, and it would be large enough space wise for some time to come. I'd much prefer to have a second hard disk though, so we can share the IO load for tasks like database, logging, static serving etc. However, with the current prices for IDE harddisks, this definitely wouldn't be a big hurdle.

The only major problem with this server is that it only comes with 512 MB RAM, which would be a downgrade from the 768 MB we currently have on adele. Folks, we really need 1 GB of RAM for the golden shiny future we all want for antville.org!

With the Antville server fund getting close to what we need, I'll start getting offers for systems that match our needs. I'll report everything I get here on the project weblog. If you know any cheap, high quality vendor, please let us know by posting a comment here - of course we'll consider everything. The main requirements are that the server must be rack-mountable, should preferably only be one rack-unit high, and must come from a major and trustworthy vendor (i.e. no experimental home-made stuff).

And of course it's still a great time to contribute to the antville server fund, if you haven't done so yet! The more we get, the more power to you!