So far I have only donated 10$ towards the PEQ project but I'm poor and have no job at the moment, if I was working I'd totally drop 100 bucks without a thought if it would help make us not disconnect often.
Now the idea of getting a server could be done if every person who plays donates 10 to 100$ you could build a new machine. Perhaps have a thermometer or a donation counter on the server homepage to show how finances are at the time.
A new server PC of 4,000 dollars like I saw mentioned earlier I think is way too much overkill for a small project that is funded from donations and your own pocketbook. You can build a reasonably priced high end desktop PC with a quad core CPU and 8gig of ram and a good quality motherboard , 7200rpm enterprise grade disks with synced spindle speed in raid 1+0 (4 disks with one spare not in the computer so if one fails of a set you can RMA, and rebuild the array with the spare and keep server going), or a raid 5 solution if that's your preference. Don't go too skimpy on the raid card for sure.
IF you were to go with a desktop CPU like an Athlon II x4 3ghz without the shared L3 cache like Phenom or Opteron it would probably look something like
500$ for mainboard chip, and 8gig of corsair xms seris performance ram maybee 100$ for a kvm ip pci card or usb SecureLinx Spider kvm over ip then a raid card ~290$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo , A thermaltake TPG-750M 87% efficent gold certified 750W psu 180$.
A good place to get a enclosure for it would be
http://www.servercase.com/Merchant2/...Code=AdvServer I purchased one of their entry level server cases, for what I believe was 89$ after shipping, solid steel with 8 drive bays 5.25" and one 3.5". Fits my 12x13 extended atx opteron board.
So around 1300-1400$ doing it that route without having purchased the hard disks.
For drives I don't know about the newer velociraptors. I hear the failure rate is pretty high, but my older original raptor disks have been running all day and night and getting beat on for a few years now and are doing well. Perhaps a cheaper 7200rpm disk set for the raid would be best, as long as they have synchronized spindle speed, avoid western digital RE disks I hear they have a horrible failure rate according to newegg reviews. If you really wanted I suppose you could step it up to Serial Attached SCSI the disks in that category are built like a tank generally which I'm sure you know. Their cost is quite a bit more.
That's just my 2cp worth, just making a few suggestions on a sub 2000$ machine. Maybe such a idea cant work out for you but I was bored and sat and wrote it. And I'm sure someone is bored and sat and read it and may have ideas of their own to post.
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