Some what similar for me, in the mid-2000's I was at a design agency that was moving to PHP/MySQL development. Mostly a Mac shop, but the development server was

Some what similar for me, in the mid-2000's I was at a design agency that was moving to PHP/MySQL development. Mostly a Mac shop, but the development server was some HP thing we got from best buy for like $400. Put Red Hat on it and did nothing else, just whatever the default PHP/MySQL package was. No tuning or anything. A little while later, Apple released the G4 xServe. We bought 2 loaded with the largest disks at the cost of several thousand dollars. But hey, OSX Server. It has PHP & MySQL and is rack mountable, etc. We also used them for file servers for all the design files. Got all of our development sites migrated over and the performance was noticeable worse. The HP was at least 4 times faster serving up the sites. It was amazing.