What do you think should I buy...?

A brand new Social Forum needs:





A web hosting plan + paying crazy money/per month





or





example:





IBM xSeries 335 Dual Intel Xeon 3.0GHz


4GB DDR ECC, 2x 36GB U320 10K RPM, RAID, 1U Rack Mount or similar...(one time payment)





Any ideas, suggestions or recommendations highly appreciated!


Thank you!
What do you think should I buy...?
A few considerations...





1) What software are you using for the social forum?





2) What does the contract you have with your ISP state? Most specifically prohibit you from running a server.





True, hosting plans can be high, but you can farm out a lot of the maintenance and administration issues. Do you really want to be on call 24 hours a day when the website goes down? Are you prepared to have a server farm and automate database replication?





And now for something completely different....





Did you know that companies are throwing out perfectly good computers every day? Before investing in the hardware, offer your services for "computer hardware disposal". Companies are more anxious to just dispose of these things instead of selling them off, which just causes corporate accounting headaches.





Seriously. Would you believe I'm writing this from an IBM rack-mounted dual processor raid system? My cost: $0.





But back to the hosting... sounds like you're going to need a dedicated box? I've seen plans like that running from $50 to $300 a month depending on the amount of assistance you need with configuration and administration. More of course if we're talking about seriously high bandwidth, like creating your own YouTube.