Unless you like to throw money away, this is a way more capable machine for around the same price.

I’d go option 2 and use some of the savings to max out the ram. I also like the extra PCIe slot on this one.

Option 3 is easily the worst deal in my opinion.

Long SMART test, dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[new disk], long smart test. That’s pretty much it.

My first switch was a 4 or 5 port gigabit model that looked exactly like this back in 2005. Also my last Netgear device.

The only ports you need forwarded on your router are 80 and 443 to the local ip address NPM is hosted at, don’t forward ports to your services from the router. Your reverse proxy forwards traffic for each subdomain to the corresponding ip and port of your services.

One drawback of using replication instead of shared storage is that all data written since the last replication job will be lost during failover. Not ideal for mission critical services or anything that relies on a database. Otherwise it’s a good solution.