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Hosted on a Mac

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Gene Steinberg

Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
Most of the time I've been online, I've used web servers running Linux. The main reason stemmed from the fact that Apple has never been that much of a player in the server space. Also, Linux servers were plentiful, cheap, speedy, reliable and not subject to much in the way of malware. They were also predictable, and though management wasn't always easy, my sites rarely went offline.

Well, this weekend, I decided to take a huge plunge. It wasn't a casual choice. Some weeks back, I read a short article about an Atlanta-based host, MacStadium, which, as the name implies, specialized in Macs. While they have recently begun to deploy the super fancy and super compact — and super expensive -- Apple Mac Pro, their main stock in trade was the super small Mac mini.

Today's Mac mini sells for a starting price of $499, but some web hosts have found them ideal for low-cost server farms. They aren't as robust as those huge and costly blade servers, but they can manage a small office and several sites without difficulty.

But what about my sites?

Early on, my first radio show, The Tech Night Owl LIVE, was hosted on a Mac, but I moved away from that setup when I quit a small online network where the show was established and went out on my own.

Well, I was offered two options to evaluate on MacStadium. One was a souped up Mac mini, with a quad-core Intel i7 processor (this configuration is no longer offered by Apple), and the other a traditional blade server. Since I love to live dangerously, I chose the former, and thus, as of this weekend, most of our sites are now hosted on that tiny Mac mini, a computer that weighs less than three pounds.

So far as I can see, it's working, and performance still seems pretty good based on early measurements.

What do you think? Yes, for a while at least, The Paracast and The Tech Night Owl are hosted on a Mac! And Chris O'Brien's Our Strange Planet too.
 
Being a freelance mobile Apple Tech and unabashed Apple fanboy I'm excited about this MacMini experiment. All seems well so far...
 
As we move on, it appears this tiny server, which weighs less than three pounds, is actually giving us slightly better performance than that huge SuperMicro box with dual 6-core Xeons. What do you think?
 
Are forums also hosted on the Mac mini? It makes sense that the Mac mini would be per-formant as the pages are mostly static. The forum might be a little more taxing as there is slightly more processing going on. Also remember that the i7 and the Xeon are pretty much equivalent (assuming same generation). So it doesn't surprise me that the i7 is nearly as per formant as the Xeon. IO and fault tolerance might be a different story.

Bottom line I think you are seeing Moore's law in effect more than Apple goodness.
 
Everything. What's interesting, however, is that the Mac mini's load is lower than the dual 6-core server we had the sites on before. We use an SSD and a gigabit port, so throughput is great. Fault tolerance? Not so. We have an external USB 3.0 backup drive, so if something goes wrong, we can move that to another box and restore.
 
Nice !!!

It would be interesting to see what the minimum viable server is. Could you host it on a RasberryPi? Although I'm sure you don't want to experiment with that : )
 
i see what you're saying.
but Innovation?
actually being on the leading edge in newness?

not TODAY's Apple. that part for them was done with Jobs' death...they seem locked in a war with Google...

if one cares not for innovation, yeah, they are pretty solid.
 
Definitely not true. Apple's pace of innovation is higher today, with more products out there. As to the Google war, iOS is going up, Android is stagnant, and is still plagued by serious security problems. Look at the numbers Apple reported compared to any single Android device. Apple has also exceeded the average growth in the PC space for years.

Remember, Apple was rarely first with a product. They were first with better solutions.
 
All the software innovation is happening in the open source world where Linux is the de-facto OS standard. Apple/Google/MS etc... piggy-back on that innovation by taking ideas from Linux and repackaging them. You see this especially in the GUI. The area where these companies can actually do ground breaking work is in the gadget area. Phones don't lend themselves to open source solutions... at least not yet.
 
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