I'm faced with unique learning opportunity at work at the moment. Due to the slowdown (amongst other reasons), the powers that be at my office have decided to abandon our shared hosting providers (both shared and dedicated hosting) and have decided to host the websites at our office's datacentre. We're running 7 websites, wherein the average unique hits per day at the moment is about 900.

We have 2 servers set aside for this - one is a DELL POWER EDGE 1850 (Intel Xeon 3 GHZ*2, 4GB RAM, 73GB HDD and the other is an HP DL 380 G3 (Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz, 6 GB RAM, 73 GB HDD)

a) I would like to know the pros and cons of going ahead with this project.All the sites will be hosted on a single IP. In all probability, the OS is going to be CentOS.

b) Do you think I should consider Virtualization into this equation (KVM/Xen)? I was thinking in terms of separate instances of the DB server and the frontend though I do not know if this is the best way to go.

c) Should I be trying to use cloud stacks like OpenStack and try to make it look like websites hosted on some sort of Public Cloud? (something that I checked out here).

Here is something else I came across, which looks similar to what needs to be done at our office.

About the websites - Of the 7 websites, 4 are basic static websites which basically gives a whole lot of information about a few local institutions. The remaining 3 are local product-based websites developed in PHP wherein end user can view products and order them online.

I am trying to take this as a learning experience wherein I can learn to build something from scratch and save the company a little something in the process. The migration needs to be completed by Easter so I guess it gives us some time (or am I being overly optimistic??).

I am confused here and would appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks in advance.