No, it's called not buying cheapass whatever the hell your local computer discount store has.
Go lookup some of the higher-end Tyan dual boards, this is pretty much what we use. If you go Intel, their VERY nice Thunder HeSL is a sweet board for $600, and for athlon their board is the best there is.. Also around $600 plus you need a $200 power supply to drive it.
We're not talking about taking your desktop single processor CPU PoS compaq and plugging it into a network here..
A typical servers of ours has a cost rundown like this.. Keep in mind some of these parts are not on all the servers, and some have more disk space, or whatnot. But you'll get the idea quick.
2U ATX Rackmount Chassis - $200
2x350W redundant low-profile PS - ~$450
4-bay SCA backplane - $150
SCSI RAID card (level5 usually is used) - $400
4x18Gb (or whatever) SCSI drives - ~$200/ea (10,000 RPM, etc.)
Server-class dual processor mobo - ~$500
2xCPU's - $150/ea or so
2GB memory - $300 now? Who knows.
Mobo has onboard NIC, and video. So need need to buy that. Add your cables and floppy/cdrom/etc. and you have yourselves an expensive little machine, that is very unlikely to fail unless a processor (use dual-fan heatsinks and monitor the fan rotations and temp. remotely to sense a failure before it happens), or mobo fails. and that is an occurance that has yet to happen to us, although we have smoked a bad DIMM once.
Power supplies and hard drives are the things that go, we've replaced litterly dozens on our small little server farm. Hence why it's so expensive to ensure redundancy there. Each server though is easily capable of pushing 50mbit/sec depending on traffic patterns, and rarely goes down.
Not to mention we're starting some other auto-failover stuff that increases the costs by 2, but should make server availabily 100%, even during planned upgrades.
See.. You can do it like that, or do a fly-by-night from your basement with your old compaq. I've done both. The latter way of doing things will fly for a little while, until something breaks. Then you're SoL as your customers scream bloody murder at you why the servers went down during a week long power outage, or whatever. Essentially it's only a matter of time until something breaks, and with your setup it *WILL* impact customers. With ours, the impact is far less likely to be as severe, if at all.
This is why you pay your hosting guys the cash you do.
To ensure your site is up and running.
-Phil