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We've since abandoned this practice as there is no Apple hardware suitable for it. We still run some Mac mini servers for things that do not run on any other OS, but definitely not web sites/apps.
We have no interest in scaling on OSX and plan to port to linux. It's an interim type of thing.
An entire colocation facility that runs Mac minis. It looks fun.
I doubt you will fine anyone who does this today for reasons other than a needing to support legacy software that only runs on OS X for some reason. All modern web application stacks run as well on Linux as they would on OS X, if not better, so there is no advantage to running OS X and lots of downsides. You need to run OS X on Apple hardware, and they haven't made a blade server for several years, so you'd be stuck…
Not true, there are several Mac based hosting companies, offering a mix of physical and virtual servers.
I doubt you will fine anyone who does this today for reasons other than a needing to support legacy software that only runs on OS X for some reason. All modern web application stacks run as well on Linux as they would on OS X, if not better, so there is no advantage to running OS X and lots of downsides. You need to run OS X on Apple hardware, and they haven't made a blade server for several years, so you'd be stuck…
> Also, if you ever wanted to move your infrastructure to the cloud you'd need to move to Linux anyway. Not true, there are several Mac based hosting companies, offering a mix of physical and virtual servers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, if you ever wanted to move your infrastructure to the cloud you'd need to move to Linux anyway. Not true, there are several Mac based hosting companies, offering a mix of physical and virtual servers.
Please name one cloud hosting provider who offers Mac OS X.
There are plenty more choices, those were just the first few I found.
Edit: Offtopic but interesting. I definitely don't have millions of users, but there are hosting companies that do mac only. You can ask them if they have large clients. (My needs are a node.js based site on virtualmacosx. I had written something locally on Mac, and it depended on things that OSX did different than Linux, and decided I didn't have the time or inclination to fix it, so went with VMOSX.)
We've got customers of all sizes. It started out with just individual developers and small teams using our solutions so they didn't have to spend capital and IT resources on their own Mac hardware. Many are still here with Mac minis rented or colocated.
Now though, we've got fortune 500 customers, many enterprise tech companies, and a growing number of unicorns joining the service since they can't do internally what we can do at scale in data centers with the Mac Pro. A lot of these customers are using us to test iOS apps with large clusters of dedicated Mac Pros connected to SAN.
[0]: We mostly serve customers that need Mac hardware for app development and CI/CD. We also have HP bladeservers, though, as a few companies have moved their entire infrastructure to our data centers or have migrated from Mac hardware to generic Linux systems and don't want to leave due to certain features we can offer.