porterj5

Nice work

Looks good

Thanks for the advice!

Put link in original post. Sorry.

Neweggbussiness.com has this server for $569. It seems to include 8 300gig 10k sas drives. Is this a good deal or is it a low price for a reason? Sorry, forgot to paste the link. https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9B-2NS-0008-0ZCM7

Yea, I think I am going to have to cut bait on this solution. There seem to be too many things to create issues and cause downtime. Thank you for all of your help!

We are using their server and shutting off our server. Transferring all data and services the local server was handling to the hosted one. Their original price quote was overpriced but they brought it down way lower than anyone else we talked to and included data back ups and server maintenance. After accounting for what we would be paying for that with a local server we were only paying an extra $100/month for the hosted server and they gave us a 30 day period that we can cancel at anytime. It seemed like a sweet deal. However, after taking some information from this thread and doing further research and starting to test things out it seems less than ideal. Currently having trouble with transfer speeds. On our ancient internal network we are able to get 11 megabytes / sec. When I transfer to and from the shared folder on the RackSpace server I am getting about 70 kilobytes / sec with a lot of small files and about 600 kilobytes / sec with one large files. Also, when restoring one of our largest client's QuickBooks file from the shared RackSpace drive it took over an hour and a half to get to 20%. I have reached out to them to see if this is just how it is or if I have something configured wrong.

@Falconevo, thank you for your reply. We signed up for it and have a 30 days get out of the contract free guarantee. During this time I have been talking with their tech support team for Windows server and network support trying to get the site to site VPN set up (turned out our ancient firewall was not up to the task so we finally replaced it). They also said that this set up should work. We have a 60 down 5 up connect at our current office and should be moving in the next couple weeks to an office with 100 down and 10 up. We access a lot of QuickBooks files from clients from the server and access the data for our tax software from it. We have about 500GB of data that we regularly access. We were attempting a hosted solution so that we would not have to have an on site server to maintain. If having this type of hosted solution has the pitfalls you listed without having an onsite one then I think we are back to looking for in office hardware.

We are attempting to move our in house server to a hosted on with Rackspace. We are currently running Windows server 2003 which is managing active directory, dhcp, network storage for all client files, and a couple of tax programs. They gave us an awesome price that includes offsite back ups and managing the server maintenance that we were going to have to be paying someone to do anyway if we kept it in house. I had talked to them and they said that it would be no problem to move the active directory to a 2012 server hosted by them. We have a site to site VPN set up and my understanding is that it will show up as just another computer on the network. In talking to the tech guy who installed our new firewall he made a comment about possibly some complications with active directory and dhcp. He said the firewall could host the dhcp but there was a lot of set up to change things. Would it be possible to host the active directory on the hosted server and dhcp on the firewall? Are there any other possible issues with having the server offsite?

I was trying to find a video from him on this. I figured there would be one at least on the OS if not the actual device. Thanks for the post!

As I mentioned in a previous post my office is looking to replace a very old Windows 2003 Server. I came across the Thecus W2810PRO which has a windows 2012 server OS on it. (https://www.neowin.net/news/thecus-w2810pro-review-a-nas-device-running-windows-storage-server-2012-r2-essentials) The 2-bay diskless version is about $400 and comes with the OS license. Add a couple of WD red drives and it would seem we would have a new windows 2012 server running for under $600 with all of our licenses. Any thoughts or experience on this?

Thanks argyle. One reason we are looking at this is to possibly eliminate having a full server and maybe moving towards just a NAS with something like JumpCloud to manage the users. Eniqmatic, I have glanced at their services but this one caught my eye with the free version for 10 or less users. Also, when I glanced at AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, the pricing seemed pretty high and trying to read through some of the information went a little over my head while bogged down in tax season. Still doing some research on how those would be set up though now that we are out of tax season.

We are looking into possible solutions for replacing our old server and possibly moving some roles it handles to a cloud solution. I came across JumpCloud.com which says they offer an Active Directory replacement that is hosted in the cloud. The idea looks great and with only having 6-7 employees in our office that seems like it may be a good fit. The concerning part for me is that they have a free account which allows up to 10 users. We are an accounting firm and as a result security of client data is a priority. When I see free for a business service I get concerned as nothing is really free.

For a remote server, does any one have any recommendations? So far what I have looked at is about $500 per month so after a year of hosting we could have paid for a new on site server.